Excerpt
The mayor of the city of Greater New York is Judge Robert A. Van Wyck.
New York city has just been passing through the most exciting election that has fallen to her lot since she became a city.
This being the first election since the passing of the charter which made New York the second largest city in the world, each political party has been trying to get a man in for mayor who represented its own especial way of thinking.
You will remember our telling you about the passing of the charter last spring, and remarking that the man who would be made mayor of this great city would have to rule over nearly three and a half millions of people. He will also have to appoint officers of the government whose salaries will amount to five hundred thousand dollars a year, and to control New York's yearly income, which will amount to more than sixty millions of the people's money.
On January 1st, 1898, Greater New York will embrace Staten Island, the whole of Brooklyn as far down the Bay as Rockaway Beach, extend as far north as Yonkers, and stretch across the country to the Sound, which it will cross to take in Queens County on Long Island.
In the recent election one of the principal candidates for the mayoralty was Mr. Seth Low, the president of Columbia University, who was mayor of the city of Brooklyn in 1881, and was re-elected to the same office in 1883. Besides Mr. Low there were Gen. Benjamin F. Tracy, who was Secretary of the Navy under President Harrison in 1889, Robert A. Van Wyck, chief judge of the city court, and Mr. Henry George.
The contest was a very lively one, and each man who thus offered his services to his city had to endure a severe course of the abuse which it is the fashion nowadays to heap on any man who puts himself before the public gaze.
Accusations have been brought by each party against the others, until, to the unprejudiced outsider, it has seemed as if none of the candidates selected was fit to hold office at all.
Judge Van Wyck and General Tracy have been accused of being so much under the rule of their party leaders that they could not possibly give New York honest government. Mr. Seth Low has been declared to be such an autocrat that he would rule the city according to his own ideas, were they good or bad. Mr. George was called a visionary person, who would turn the world upside down if ever he came into power. These were, of course, the opinions of the candidates' enemies. To their friends each of them was felt to be the one man for whom the city had been waiting, and whose election would insure the best possible government at the lowest possible cost to the people.
You may judge for yourselves that all these opinions could not possibly be true; and that therefore the candidates, as well as their parties, must have had their good sides and their bad sides. We can only hope that Judge Van Wyck, who was elected to the position by a very large majority, may prove to be the best man for the place.
A very sad and painful turn was given to the election by the sudden death of Mr. Henry George, one of the candidates....