Tweed's Gift of Fifty Thousand Dollars to the Poor of his Native Ward. (Harper's Weekly, January 14th, 1871.)
What an escape we had! But, also, what immeasurable harm was done! From being a city where every one wished to live, or, at least, often to remain, they allowed New York to become a place from which all escaped who could. Nothing saved its business predominance but certain facts of geology and geography which Rings can not alter. Two generations of wise and patriotic exertion will not undo the mischief done by that knot of scoundrels in about six years. The press caught them at the full tide of their success, when the Tammany Ring, in fell alliance with a railroad ring, was confident of placing a puppet of its own in the Presidential chair. The history of this melancholy lapse, from the hour when an alderman first pocketed a quire of note-paper, or carried from the tea-room a bundle of cigars, to the moment of Tweed's rescue from a felon's cell through the imperfection of the law, were a subject worthier far of a great American writer in independent circumstances than any he could find in the records of the world beyond the sea. The interests of human nature, not less than the special interests of this country, demand that it should be written; for all the nations are now in substantially the same moral and political condition. Old methods have become everywhere inadequate before new ones are evolved; and meanwhile the Scoundrel has all the new forces and implements at his command. If ever this story should be written for the instruction of mankind, the historian will probably tell us that two young men of the New York press did more than any others to create the feeling that broke the Ring. Both of them naturally loathed a public thief. One of these young men in the columns of an important daily paper, and the other on the broad pages of Harper's Weekly, waged brilliant and effective warfare against the combination of spoilers. They made mad the guilty and appalled the free. They gave, also, moral support to the able and patriotic gentlemen who, in more quiet, unconspicuous ways, were accumulating evidence that finally consigned some of the conspirators to felons' cells, and made the rest harmless wanderers over the earth.
"Who Stole the People's Money?"—DO TELL. N.Y. TIMES.
'TWAS HIM.
(Thomas Nast, in Harper's Weekly, August 19th, 1871.)
Comic art is now well established among us. In the illustrated papers there are continually appearing pictures which are highly amusing, without having the incisive, aggressive force of Mr. Nast's caricatures. The old favorites of the public, Bellew, Eytinge, Reinhart, Beard, are known and admired, and the catalogue continually lengthens by the addition of other names. Interesting sketches, more or less satirical, bear the names of Brackmere, C. G. Parker, M. Woolf, G. Bull, S. Fox, Paul Frenzeny, Thomas Worth, Hopkins, Frost, Wust, and others. Among such names it is delightful to find those of two ladies, Mary M'Donald and Jennie Browscombe. The old towns of New England abound in undeveloped and half-developed female talent, for which there seems at present no career. There will never be a career for talent undeveloped or half developed. Give the schools in those fine old towns one lesson a week in object-drawing from a teacher that knows his business, keep it up for one generation, and New England girls will cheer all homes by genial sketches and amusing glimpses of life, to say nothing of more important and serious artistic work. The talent exists; the taste exists. Nothing is wanting but for us all to cast away from us the ridiculous notion that the only thing in human nature that requires educating is the brain. We must awake to the vast absurdity of bringing up girls upon algebra and Latin, and sending them out into a world which they were born to cheer and decorate unable to walk, dance, sing, or draw; their minds overwrought, but not well nourished, and their bodies devoid of the rudiments of education.
