THE CITY. The Sorrows of the City. Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying the Time, City children soak and blacken soul and ser.se in city slime? There, among the gloomy alleys, Progress halts on pal sied feet; Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousands on the street. There the master scrimps his haggard sempstress of her daily bread; There a single, sordid attic holds the living and the dead. There the smoldering fire of fever creeps across the rot ten floor And the crowded couch of incest in the warrens of the poor. The City at Night. TENNYSON. That stifled hum of Midnight, when Traffic has lain down to rest; and the chariot-wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to halls roofed-in and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only Vice and Misery, to prowl or to moan like night-birds, are abroad; that hum, I say, like the sterto rous, unquiet slumber of sick Life, is heard in Heaven! Oh, under that hideous coverlet of vapors and putrefactions and unimaginable gases, what a Fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid! The joyful and the sorrowful are there; men are dying there, men are being born, men are praying. On the other side of a brick partition, men are cursing. And around them all is the vast void, Night. The proud Grandee still lingers in his perfumed saloons, or reposes within damask curtains; Wretchedness cowers into truckle-beds or shivers hunger-stricken into its lair of straw; in obscure cellars Rouge-et-Noir languidly emits its voice-of-destiny to haggard, hungry villains; while Councilors of State sit plotting and playing their high chess game, whereof the pawns are Men. The Lover whispers his mistress that the coach is ready; and she, full of hope and fear, glides down, to fly with him over the borders; the Thief, still more silently, sets-to his pick-locks and crowbars, or lurks in wait till the watchmen first snore in their boxes. Gay mansions, with supper-rooms and dancing-rooms, are full of light and music and high-swelling hearts; but, in the condemned cells, the pulse of life beats tremulous and faint, and blood-shot eyes look out through the darkness, which is around and within, for the light of a stern last morning. Six men are to be hanged on the morrow; their gallows must even now be a-building. Upward of five hundred thousand two-legged animals without feathers lie round 1 us, in horizontal position, their heads all in night-caps and full of the most foolish dreams. Riot cries aloud, and staggers and swaggers in his rank dens of shame; and the Mother, with streaming hair, kneels over her pallid, dying infant, whose cracked lips only her tears now moisten. All these heaped and huddled together, with nothing but a little carpentry and masonry between them -crammed-in like salted fish in their barrel or weltering like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers, each struggling to get its head above the others! Such work goes on under that smoke counterpane! But I sit above it all; I am alone with the stars. —Carlyle. The Whisky Ring in City Politics. Great cities are likely to rule the American Republic. They will also ruin it, if they are governed by the whisky ring, as they have been in a majority of cases thus far in our history. The predominant political influence of the whisky ring in great and corrupt cities is incompatible with the success of American institutions, or with safety to life and property under universal suffrage in mismanaged municipalities.-JOSEPH Cook. Condensed Comments. The city is the strategic point of our modern life. We shall lose the battle for righteousness if we do not plant our batteries in the city, and man them with our best soldiers. CHARLES C. ALBERTSON. There Mammon holds high carnival in its gilded pal aces while little children hunger, mothers grow faint for food and die, and strong men weep for want of work. W. T. STEAD. The city is the most difficult and perplexing problem of modern times.-FRANCIS LIEBER. |