Year: 1873

reform, and as every one is grumbling at the
quality served up of late there is some chance
that everybody is wrong. 1t took two reform
Legislatures to give New York one reform
charter, and we are unable to say how long it
will take the reform charter to give us re-
formed city government The Bismarcks and
Won Moltkes of reform at Albany swept every
thing before them last session that they wanted
to sweep They refrained magnanimously
from being too sweeping, and were satisfied
with o nominal surrender of several fortresses
of city pap, leaving the old commanders in
charge, AZ Alexander, the Gar, has left the
Khan of Khiva. The Russian Empire gains
some two million roubles by its piece of busi-
ness in this line, and some curious people are
agitated to know whether our Khans of the
departments paid an indemnity last Spring to
the Cossacks of the Empire State They
formed the Board of Health, but q glance
around the streets will make the most credu-
lous mortal doubt that the broom of reform
has brushed away an atom of the mud and
filth that still smell to heaven from our streets
In memory of the good old days Of Iammany
corruption. Dean Swift once said that the
bishops appointed by the English King to Ire
land were good people enough, but that the
footpads on Hounslow Heath systematically
stole their patents and lawn and came over to
the Emerald Isle in the bishops clothes
Surely this or something very like it has hap
pened to our reform commissioners, for the
new appointees have developed qualities of
head and heart strangely at variance with the
sugar-plum sweetness Of the reform article in
the prospectus. It is popular idea that the
road to Erebus is paved with good intentions,
but the streets Of New York are paved, swept
and disinfected with good Resolutions. To
| show how passable the streets are, the resolves
begin with q preamble running over the
filthy places of the city. The matter is left
there, however and the chariot wheel of
Time sinks in putrescent mud to the hub the
same as ever. The Board of Health, under
the new "deal," was expected to form a firm
plank for reform in the future. Like the
wooden pavement of Murray street. it disap-
pears under the sloughs of the uncleaned city
for week at time. 1t comes to the surface
occasionally and floats about aimlessly as the
remains of shanty in the inundated open
lots near the Park. The track of reform in
this particular is as visible as the trail of
grocer's wagon through the viscous puddles
Of ungraded Worth street.


We have just now state of truce in our
city battle for the spois. The key to the
position has been lost apparently in the
Mayors Office, and so most people have come
to regard the situation as deadlock"
Others prefer to call it combination lock.
If so the Mayor has forgotten the magic word,
''divide," or chivalrously refuses to utter it.
The dilemma of the stubborn old gentleman
who was elected by the republicans last Novem'
Der would be comical if it were not one de-
manding a display of our finest feelings


the charter caused him such disappointment
Like the witches in Macbeth" that instru-
ment held promise to the ear which was very
surprisingly broken to the hope It was
arranged that he was to nominate officials and
the fifteen Aldermen to confirm or reject


but the Bagstocks of the Board of Aldermen
were sly-devilish sly. They discovered that
it was possible neither to confirm
nor reject Those who have read
Lord Lytton's last novel will recall that
Decimus Roach author of the approach
to the Angels" slid away from the doctrine Of
celibacy into the state Of matrimony as o
glorious martyr, and 'not for his personal
satisfaction. From grounds taken similarly
high up in the aesthetic regions of refined
humanitarianism, bare majority Of the City
Fathers resolved that it was not good for the
dear old Knickerbocker Mayor to give New
York its reformed Police Justices in such
small doses as two at q time. His pills might
be good enough, but they could not endorse
them to the faculty and the public on such
small samples. Ten or none was their ulti-
matum. Two or none was the gray-headed
veterans response. There are pictures in
history more celebrated for their pathos than
the one now before us; but Medea, with her
two babies, was nota more affecting sight than
Mayor Havemeyer, with his two little Police
Justices by the hand as he stood before the
eight obdurate Aldermen, asking that they
might not be kept out of the little cribs he had
designed for them. Hagar praying for two
little Ishmaels instead of one in the parched
desert of Beersheba could scarcely have drawn
more tears from good Sunday school children
than the Mayor praying for his little ones
amid the German Aldermen parched under
the new lager law. The feelings of Lucius
Junius Brutus as he put his two sons
to death have been the admiration Of
many stoically righteous class of Freshmen,
who have felt that they could sacrifice their
teachers, parents and guardians under similar
conditions. But who shall tell the depths Of
devotion to principle and public trust into
which the eight Aldermen were plunged in
order to resist the prayers of so good man
as the Mayor about his two little Police JUS