64
CITY GOVERNMENT,
ten, furnishes volumes in vindication of each of these views. Cheered by the future and warned by the past, our faith lingers when we accept a third of each as truth.
Aristotle says that the popular orator is a dangerous public parasite.
Burke, who spent a half century in the study of governments, tells us that in matters of national right and wrong the people are usually to be trusted.
Gladstone affirms that the people gain most of their political knowledge from the press, and our greatest living American orator declares that "nothing but milksoops and fribbles indulge in the amusement of keeping journals."
Hume says that in self-governed states the power rests with the numerical majority.
Plato continues that in every community the fools are in the majority, and Froude adds that it is the special characteristic of a fool that he generally chooses to have an opinion of his own.
And weeping "Bob,'" when he looked into the future, might have sobbed, 'tears for the dead and cheers for the living.'
We are hopeful and draw our own conclusions, deeming the opinions of each not as a proof but as an indication of where truth rests.
If some great statesman could rise before us, whose political foresight and judgment could discern the workings of our institutions and the circumstances under which our commonwealth exists, as clearly as did Demosthenes those of Greece, when he stirred the "men of Athens" with a voice like a trumpet, to fight Philip of Macedon, he would say, of all the issues which will command the attention of the American people, the question of how to govern our cities well will demand the most energetic thought and active moral courage. We are accustomed to boast of our cities, of their rapid growth and splendor of their riches
and fine dwellings, of their manufactures and commerce, of their intellectual and social advantages, and our people are everywhere hastening into these, fancied Utopias, to be engulfed in the cloud of city temptation and wrecked virtue which hangs over them as dark and heavy as their clouds of smoke.
While they are centers of business and trade, yet they are not producers, but consumers of wealth; and the wealth is by no means owned by the people, but belongs to a few monied kings who have assumed the mastership of throngs of the poorer classes. Of the vast amount of real and personal property incorporated within the bounds of the city of New York, four thousand persons control more than one-half of it.
Of the fate of ancient and modern cities time scarcely allows reference. Of Babylon, the symbol of civic corruption; of Athens, striving for everlasting beauty, teaching humanity for centuries, and then falling supine in crime and sluggishness; of Thebes, aspiring to gigantic grandeur, wasting away in feasts, banquets and revelry; of Carthage, the slave of greedy merchants, devoid of honor, integrity and patriotism; of the dying embers of Corinth, or the flaming ruins of Jerusalem; of Rome, founded on the experience of ages, built in the radiant light of the cities she destroyed, and after assuming and collecting to herself the wealth of the world, she rots in debauchery, and in turn illumines the distant paths of history by her own flames, fired by the torch of Alaric and resounding by the shouts of the Vandals. But where in the records of history can we find a parallel to the lawless atrocity of our own age? In the fate of Paris. For years she smouldered, heated by her own moral decay. At last the flame, fanned by her own people and fed by blasted human principles, broke out. The corruption of ages burned.