October 27. After a chilly, wet day the city is steeping and stewing in a tepid mucilage of fog, such fog as prevails in cities, definable as the gaseous form of mud and civic filthiness; Fat Fog, lit up in every direction by the glare of tar-barrels and straw-bonfires that blaze before the multitudinous lager-beer saloons and pot-houses in which we, the people, congregate tonight, as we do every night now, and call ourselves ratification meetings, and the like.
The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, Abridged by Thomas J. Pressly
October 28. “I rise, Mr. President, for the purpose merely of stating for the information of this meeting” that I am aweary of ward-meetings, and that my soul is sick of vigilance committees. I suppose it’s one’s duty in this country to mix in these matters and that like the majority of my friends, I’ve been criminally negligent all my life in omitting to exercise my sovereign functions otherwise than by voting and in letting the machinery that is practically so much more important than any single vote take care of itself. But it’s a very dreary function. A ward-meeting is no Witenagemot. Gas, bad grammar, bad manners, bad taste, bad temper, unnecessary rhetoric, and excitement, and affected enthusiasm about “our” candidate for this or that twopenny office, agonizings and wrestlings over momentous points of order, conscientious misgivings whether we can “legally” take this question till we’ve taken that other question, dirty little substrata of intrigue and jealousy about chairmanships and the like. It doesn’t raise one’s estimate of humanity.
The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, Abridged by Thomas J. Pressly