As for him,
perhaps, he is just a sign that the world moves.
Move it did at last in the year (1894) that gave us the Lexow
Investigating Committee, the Citizens' Seventy, and reform. Tammany
went out, speeded on its way by Dr. Parkhurst, and an administration
came in that was pledged to all we had been longing and laboring
for. For three years we had free hands and we used them. Mayor
Strong's administration was not the millennium, but it brought New
York much nearer to it than it had ever been, and it set up some
standards toward which we may keep on striving with profit to
ourselves. The Mayor himself was not a saint. He was an honest
gentleman of sturdy purpose to do the right, and, normally, of
singular practical wisdom in choosing the men to help him do it,
but with an intermittent delusion that he was a shrewd politician.
When it came uppermost he made bargains and appointed men to office
who did their worst to undo what good the Warings, the Roosevelts,
and their kind had wrought. In the struggle that ensued Mayor Strong
was always on the side of right, but when he wanted most to help
he could not.
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