The Monitor. [volume] (Woodstown, N.J.) 1884-1892, 1884-03-21
OUR GOVERNMENT.
BY j. j. CRANDALL.

manifested in the government of our cities.
Our cities arc the centres of our learning, bus
mess, wealth, fashion, debauchery and crime.
Can they be governed in fact, not in theory,
SO as to promote the happiness, the substan-
tial good of humanity and society?
1t must be confessed in shame, in the face
of the existing state of the city service. that
this problem is in sad state of doubt The
theory of city government service is substan-
TALLY good. The most awkwardly devised
city charter can be worked with patriotic
and faithful service to substantial good. 1t
is not, therefore, amended charters that we
want, it is an honest city service. An en-
lightened, dutiful, faithful, and not an ignor-
ant despoiing, and criminal service. 1t is
improvement in public service that we want
to save the country; to save our educational
system; to save our property to realize the
luxuries and blessings that city life and its
burdens taxation, etc.-ls well adapted to
give. Shall these marts of learning, business,
fashion and pleasure be surrendered? Are
they realizable under our system? Can cities
be worked in the interest of humanity and not
in the interest of the despoiler? That cities
are fast becoming a prey to vandalism and
spoliation and crime is of common fame-the
settled conviction of all observers. The dis
ease is conceded the calamity is malignant
how to save the darling ship? If it be water
logged the most idle minded sailor would ex-
claim, plank the hole and man the pumps i"
If Chinese pirates have got on board, fire
them out. Use practical means; not senti-
mental vaporings. Apply effective machin-
cry to the situation. The city is infested
with an ignorant, groveling, villanous, self
serving service. One election in the interest
of the ship is sufficient to rid our beloved
craft of the whole school of vermin that have
rendered it almost unseaworthy. One bust
ness-like election, one patriotic vote by each
of the 5000 voters in this city would send the
idle, thriftless gang scrambling from the ship
to the shore. Shall we ever have such an
election? What is the matter? The mischief
is plain. The remedy is plain. What then
is the matter? Ask the oak which is bent
and dwarfed by the parasite myrtle and
mistletoe, why he does not shake them off
and rise in his giant might. The answer
will be that these parasites have sucked out
and absorbed my vigor-my life currents,
and they have thrust their tendrils and an
tenna so far into me that l cannot. | am
weak, and had I not better turn parasite and
live on others substance?
Ask the leper on the highway in Palestine
why he takes SO much room, and he will
answer, [ am law unto myself am mon
arch of all I survey am too vicious to be
disturbed Shall we surrender to the politi-
cal leper, and say that he is so thoroughly in
trenched in the public service that the city
cannot be disinfected of him: These ver-
min, parasites. lepers, and vultures not only
seem to carry on an unmolested frolic and
carnival in misery, but they seem to have
the means of neutralizing all remedies They
seem to own all the remedial agents. They
seem to paralyze the benefcent impulses of
nature herself toward the race.
In other words the office-holders and their
-partners-the rum clowns-have appro-
priated the city to their own use, and they
propose by intensifying this conspiracy to
have the city treasury to themselves to per-
petuate an open carnival of ignorant, reckless
misrule.
pure office-holding conspiracy, the
people have yet nerve enough to battle, but
when the Office holding magcians ally them
selves to the soulless rum machine, it really
seems that these allied forces are too much
for the present popular philanthropic nerve.
The enterprises of organized of6ce-holders
the people can take care of, but when they
are reinforced by the virus of the rum NEGRO
mancers shall we then surrender? Is the
moral nerve of the husbands and fathers
struck with hopeless atrophy at the approach
of the army of whiskey magicians, the misery
mongers, who with a kind of legal license,
political sorcery, beguile the honest, industrial
masses into captivity without a struggle?
Poor human naturel Unwilling vassals to
despicable gang of taskmasters What
pitiable and at the same time contemplate
service, The tyrannous rum-m master has rob-
bed us out of faithful, patriotic and honor
able public service. They have squeezed our
school system into beggary, and turned the
revenues of an otherwise thrifty people to
the care, board and support of an army
of victims of depraved, merciless, terrorizing
rum commerce.
They deface almost every department of the
their traffic in maddening drink. They mine
into the most sacred places under the mask OF
law and locate the dynamite cartridges that are
soon to explode in embeZzlements thefts,
murder The bank clerk tipples, the school
master takes drink, the merchant drops IN,
the father and son take smile at this licensed
popular fountain of hydrophobia and when
they are once within the charmed surround
ings of this baechanalian altar they are then
recruited to all the services of perdition that
the craft may command. They corral with
merciless severity the victims of their william
GUS business and command them into an abject
servility that the souless Ottoman would resist.
They control elections as with the wand of
fate itself They marshal their victims to
the primary meetings with drill that de-
mands an unthinking surrender of all that is
manly. They require the aspirants for office
to sit like mummies between the upper and
neither millstones of the beer machine and
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