The Cambridge of eighteen hundred and ninety-six: a picture of the city and its industries fifty years after its incorporation
Arthur Gilman, Ed.

[90] beyond any community in this hemisphere, ought to have been expected to be the place where something unique and germinal in its relation to the civic and ethical well-being of this land should break forth.

2. But, passing beyond the historical significance of the city, its large intellectual meaning, and its being favored of God in the bestowal upon it of genius and of poetry, we need to come to the nearer years. I think it would be impossible for those streets which Lowell had trod, and for the slopes where he had chanted to himself the ‘Biglow Papers’ and the deathless ‘Commemoration Ode,’ to be other than almost trembling with passionate desire for fair play, for good government, for the realization of the rights of man, and for the fulfillment of the civic and moral possibilities of all dwelling within its borders. Lowell was a better singer of good politics than a practical worker in its details, though his practical services in several particulars rank high in the annals of such endeavor; but the spirit of Lowell, and of his friends, in this regard, has for now not a few decades been haunting our streets and lanes, entering our homes, and dominating our council-boards. It is now a quarter of a century or more, therefore, since we have tolerated partisanship in our municipal affairs. Other fine traits and realizations of a civic nature have been long among us: the idea, for example, of municipal office as a municipal trust, the notion that the city must be administered as faithfully and sagaciously as any business concern of highest standing; various memorable battles as between the sons of Belial and the children of light in civic directions, which had stirred our city profoundly prior to the last decade; the wonderfully tonic prestige of large victories in these directions, and much more to the same purport. All this constituted our more immediate political heritage down to ten years ago.

3. It was in this condition that the city was, as it turned the milestone of 1885, and faced toward 1886. It had had a glorious past. That past was such as to make it all alive with noblest civic and ethical impulses. That past, for now a good number of years, had been rendering possible the abolition of partisanship in municipal affairs, and certain great and victorious struggles betwixt the baser and the nobler elements in the city's life.

But now there was creeping like a paralysis over the city that