CITY GOVERNMENT.
63
LITERARY
WITH SLOWER PEN.
With slower pen men used to write,
Of old, when "letters" were "polite;"
In Anna's or in George's days,
They could afford to turn a phrase,
Or trim a straggling theme aright.
They knew not steam; electric light Not yet had dazed their calmer sight; They meted out both blame and praise With slower pen.
More swiftly now the hours take flight!
What's read at morn is dead at night;
Scant space have we for Art's delays,
Whose breathless thought so briefly stays
We may not work—ah! would we might,
With slower pen!
CITY GOVERNMENT.
The scenes painted in the history of our young republic are not less immortal than those of Greece and Rome, or old England herself. You know the stories—how we killed the native savages and took possession of their soil, how we wrested the reins of government from the hands of king George, and how, after a century's struggling, we freed ourselves from that devouring cancer, human slavery, which was fast corrupting our principles and eating away our national life. Though the newest, and in extent the vastest independent settlement of our race, we have borne a strain, says the historian, as hard as any community of men was ever called on to go through. The union on American soil of so much that is new and untried with so much that is ripe with age and experience from ancient civilizations, affords subjects of speculation deeper, perhaps, than can be found in the history of
any other commonwealth. Our orators—Wendell Phillips leading the van—tell us that we have demonstrated the fact of a democratic government, of a free people successfully managing their own affairs. Practical statesmen tell us that this is simply the language of an oracle; that the progress which our country has made for a century past, is due not to any problem of government which has been actually worked out, but to our vast territory, abundant resources, natural wealth, and to the care with which they have watched over the cradle of liberty. Again, the voice of the people speaks, and we hear that the government rests in the hands of a mob of selfish, unprincipled men, some of them accessible to bribes and the rest ready to "wink at corruption," and to sacrifice honor for the sake of personal advantage or that of their party. The history of our country, as writ-