The Cambridge of eighteen hundred and ninety-six. A picture of the city and its industries fifty years after its incorporation (1896) (14781875691)

Identifier: cambridgeofeight00gilm (find matches)
Title: The Cambridge of eighteen hundred and ninety-six. A picture of the city and its industries fifty years after its incorporation
Year: 1896 (1890s)
Authors: Gilman, Arthur, 1837-1909
Subjects: Cambridge (Mass.) Cambridge (Mass.) -- History
Publisher: Cambridge, Riverside press
Contributing Library: University of Connecticut Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Connecticut Libraries



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unicipal trust, thenotion that the city must be administered as faithfully and saga-ciously as any business concern of highest standing; variousmemorable battles as between the sons of Belial and the chil-dren of light in civic directions, which had stirred our city pro-foundly prior to the last decade ; the wonderfully tonic prestigeof large victories in these directions, and much more to thesame purport. All this constituted our more immediate politi-cal heritage down to ten years ago. 3. It was in this condition that the city was, as it turned themilestone of 1885, and faced toward 1886. It had had a glori-ous past. That past was such as to make it all alive with noblestcivic and ethical impulses. That past, for now a good numberof years, had been rendering possible the abolition of partisan-ship in municipal affairs, and certain great and victorious strug-gles betwixt the baser and the nobler elements in the cityslife. But now there was creeping like a paralysis over the city that
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FROZEN TRUTH. 91 chief modern foe to good civics, the power of the rum traffic.A sharp distinction is to be drawn between drink itself, and thequestions having to do with it, and that greater abomination,the organized, covetous, unscrupulous traffic, which, making mer-chandise of human souls for its own aggrandizement, works themost fearful evils in almost all dense populations. Massachusetts, by her local-option law of 1881, had beengiving her cities and towns the opportunity to throw off thisparalysis, and many of them had taken advantage of it, in-cluding our border city of Somerville, which, for some years,had excluded the saloon. The result was that Cambridge hadto do a large part of Somervilles liquor business as well asher own. There being as yet no population limit for the grant-ing of licenses, one hundred and twenty-two of these nefariousplaces existed within the city ; disorder was on the increase inour streets ; those elements which always attend the saloon werebecoming do