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government republican in form. In those cities the legislative branch, as we all know—whether we live in Boston, or Philadelphia, or Chicago, or here—has broken down—hopelessly, confessedly broken down. It has broken down, too—fallen into utter discredit—from the same defect in machinery which makes it impossible for Mr. Schurz to appeal to us as a constituency, or for us to offer ourselves as a constituency to Mr. Schurz. We are disfranchised by ward lines in our cities, as by district lines in the nation. The representative cannot seek the constituency; neither can the constituency go outside of its territorial limits to look for its representative. Custom supplements law to make complete the bottling, and it is the weakest link in the chain which breaks first.
Not long ago, in the course of a dinner-table discussion, carried on almost within the sound of my voice at this moment, I heard the question suddenly asked why, here in New-York, politics tended more and more to the machine, and the type of machine-men, as contra-distinguished from statesmen. Formerly the Empire State developed public characters of a high order—Clintons, Maroys, Wrights, Sewards—whereas now only men of quite another stamp are forthcoming. [Laughter.] The soil, it was said, is the same; why this difference in its fruit? In the first place, I submit, the soil is not the same. A community living in larger and larger proportion in city slums is not the same as a community in greatest part agricultural; and, in the next place, the methods of fruit culture have changed. From another soil and another culture, a different fruit will result; very possibly a poisonous fruit, from a
