第36章

With others I did my best against him; but while condemning his political course as severely as was possible to me, I never attacked his personal character or his motives. The consequence was that, while politically we were enemies, personally a sort of friendship remained, and I recall few things with more pleasure than my journeyings from Albany up the Mohawk Valley, sitting at his side, he giving accounts to me of the regions through which we passed, and the history connected with them, regarding which he was wonderfully well informed. If he hated New England as the breeding bed of radicalism, he loved New York passionately.

The first important duty imposed upon me as chairman of the committee on education was when there came up a bill for disposing of the proceeds of public lands appropriated by the government of the United States to institutions for scientific and technical education, under what was then known as the Morrill Act of 1862. Of these lands the share which had come to New York was close upon a million acres--a fair-sized European principality. Here, owing to circumstances which I shall detail in another chapter, I found myself in a contest with Mr. Cornell. I favored holding the fund together, letting it remain with the so-called ``People's College,'' to which it had been already voted, and insisted that the matter was one to be referred to the committee on education.

Mr. Cornell, on the other hand, favored the division of the fund, and proposed a bill giving one half of it to the ``State Agricultural College'' recently established at Ovid on Seneca Lake. The end was that the matter was referred to a joint committee composed of the committees on literature and agriculture, that is, to Mr. Cornell's committee and my own, and as a result no meeting to consider the bill was held during that session.

Gradually I accumulated a reasonable knowledge of the educational interests intrusted to us, but ere long there came in from the superintendent of public instruction; Mr. Victor Rice, a plan for codifying the educational laws of the State. This necessitated a world of labor on my part. Section by section, paragraph by paragraph, phrase by phrase, I had to go through it, and night after night was devoted to studying every part of it in the light of previous legislation, the laws of other States, and such information as could be obtained from general sources. At last, after much alteration and revision, I brought forward the bill, secured its passage, and I may say that it was not without a useful influence upon the great educational interests of the State.

I now brought forward another educational bill. Various persons interested in the subject appeared urging the creation of additional State normal schools, in order to strengthen and properly develop the whole State school system. At that time there was but one; that one at Albany; and thus our great Commonwealth was in this respect far behind many of her sister States. The whole system was evidently suffering from the want of teachers thoroughly and practically equipped. Out of the multitude of projects presented, I combined what I thought the best parts of three or four in a single bill, and although at first there were loud exclamations against so lavish a use of public money, I induced the committee to report my bill, argued it in the Senate, overcame much opposition, and thus finally secured a law establishing four State normal schools.

Still another duty imposed upon me necessitated much work for which almost any other man in the Senate would have been better equipped by experience and knowledge of State affairs. The condition of things in the city of New York had become unbearable; the sway of Tammany Hall had gradually brought out elements of opposition such as before that time had not existed. Tweed was already making himself felt, though he had not yet assumed the complete control which he exercised afterward.

The city system was bad throughout; but at the very center of evil stood what was dignified by the name of the ``Health Department.'' At the head of this was a certain Boole, who, having gained the title of ``city inspector,'' had the virtual appointment of a whole army of so-called ``health inspectors,'' ``health officers,'' and the like, charged with the duty of protecting the public from the inroads of disease; and never was there a greater outrage against a city than the existence of this body of men, absolutely unfit both as regarded character and education for the duties they pretended to discharge.

Against this state of things there had been developed a ``citizens' committee,'' representing the better elements of both parties,--its main representatives being Judge Whiting and Mr. Dorman B. Eaton,--and the evidence these gentlemen exhibited before the committee on municipal affairs, at Albany, as to the wretched condition of the city health boards was damning. Whole districts in the most crowded wards were in the worst possible sanitary condition. There was probably at that time nothing to approach it in any city in Christendom save, possibly, Naples. Great blocks of tenement houses were owned by men who kept low drinking bars in them, each of whom, having secured from Boole the position of ``health officer,'' steadily resisted all sanitary improvement or even inspection. Many of these tenement houses were known as ``fever nests''; through many of them small-pox frequently raged, and from them it was constantly communicated to other parts of the city.

Therefore it was that one morning Mr. Laimbeer, the only Republican member from the city, rose, made an impassioned speech on this condition of things, moved a committee to examine and report, and named as its members Judge Munger, myself, and the Democratic senator from the Buffalo district, Mr. Humphrey.