GENERAL TRACY.
CHAPTER VI.
THE PLÉBISCITE FOR A CÆSAR.
The contest for the mayoralty of Greater New York, which was fought out at the polls on the 2nd of November, has been one of the most famous elections ever fought. To begin with, never before have half a million electors voted in the same day for the election of a chief magistrate. Greater New York contains more that 3,000,000 inhabitants, and 567,000 registered electors. The constituency is not more vast than the powers of the mayor are unlimited. As no chief magistrate before received the suffrages of so many electors, so no chief magistrate was ever invested with such absolute authority. Mr. Van Wyck, the new Mayor of Greater New York, for six months at least is almost as much master of New York as Napoleon III. was master of France after the plébiscite which installed him at the Tuileries. The two-chambered elective council of the city has even less control over his municipal appointments than the senate and Corps Législatif of the Second Empire. For so great a stake it was natural that all parties should enter their best men, and that the contest should be fought with as much energy as a Presidential Election.
The first to enter the field was Mr. Seth Low, the President of Columbian University, and the candidate of the Citizens’ Union. Mr. Low—or Seth Low as he is usually called—was the first Reform Mayor of the City of Brooklyn, where he was re-elected and served a second term. Although he belongs to the Republican party, he stood as the candidate of those who object to the subordination of municipal to national issues. The one great curse which has plagued New York in the past has been that its citizens never had a chance of voting upon a straight civic issue, but were always pulled hither and thither by the conflicting interest of the Republican or Democratic parties, compared with whose real or imaginary interests the welfare of the city was regarded as dust in the balance. Mr. Low was one of the leading members of the Commission which framed the Charter of Greater New York. He is a man of education, of leisure, of experience, and of the highest character. The Citizens’ Union was formed last winter in the old City of New York, with the object of electing what is called a non-partisan mayor. The Citizens’ Union, although nominally non-partisan, was really recruited in a great measure by the Republicans. Hence it was regarded by the leaders of the Republican machine as virtually a revolt against the Republican Caucus, and the Chairman of the County Republican Committee publicly declared that the Republican party would much rather see a Tammany man installed as the first Mayor of Greater New York than a mayor who was not the nominee of the Republican organisation. And the Republican Party men have had their wish.
THE HIGHEST BUILDING IN NEW YORK.
American Surety Company.