IT HAS OFTEN BEEN REMARKED BY OBSERVERS familiar with the events of the Tweed period and the subsequent startling and shameful developments consequent upon the gigantic robberies of the ring long since dispersed to the four winds of Heaven, that Brooklyn was scarcely, if at all, touched by the contamination. Politics and government on this side of the river were preserved from the debasing and demoralizing atmosphere which like a plague spread in other directions. Said a highly respected member of the Society Of Old Brooklynites to me on this point: "The fact is, that Brooklyn promises to become, if it is not already, the model community in a political and governmental sense. Our people at times imagine that they have a great deal to find fault with, but if the grumblers will stop to think a little and look around them, they will come down precipitately from the perch of criticism and fault finding. We have had our troubles in the past, and have not been without our minor municipal thieveries, but it is so long since we had anything resembling an exposure of dishonesty in local government, either county or city, that the recollection thereof is like a memory of the Revolutionary epoch.

THE EXPLANATION OF THIS is to be found not in any astonishing qualities developed in our public men or because of the exceptional purity or utility of our political methods or practices, but in the calm, solid, sober sense of the people. Our urban edifice is solid at the foundation. Although the cosmopolitan elements enter into our population to an extraordinary degree, everybody seems to take an interest and feel a thrill of personal pride in the development and well being of Brooklyn. To every man who lives here the thought drives itself home that he is, in the words of a scriptural toast drunk at a recent banquet, a citizen "of no mean city." Brooklyn is, and from the very character of its population is bound to continue, a "City of Homes," beside enjoying expanding magnitude as a business and manufacturing center."

THE PASSAGE OF THE BILLS making the Register's and County Clerk's offices salaried has effected an extraordinary reduction in the number of candidates for nomination in both parties. Still, as there is a good deal of patronage involved, the "boys" may think better of it when the leaves begin to fade.

IN COMMON WITH SOME SEVENTY ODD FELLOW citizens one day last week I took a ear on one of the Deacon's lines, and managed, as I stood in the jam on the rear platform, to catch the eye of a newsboy. Before he could produce the Eagle demanded of him he was ordered off the step of the car. It appeared that the little shaver was in the position of the guest without a wedding garment, which means that he had not the badge, obtained from the office of the Atlantic avenue Railroad Company, in exchange for certain pennies, which entitled him to the privilege of selling papers upon the diaconal thoroughfares. The conductor's explanation was so ingenious that it must be included among the unpublished instructions, like that which orders them to make good broken lamp chimneys, kindling wood in Winter and the like. it is that there is "such a raft of boys selling newspapers that it's necessary to check them" for transportation to the favorite conductorial limbo, presumably and, what's more, they get their money back when they go out of the business." When the Atlantic avenue Cable Elevated Railroad is in operation will the same process of unnatural selection and the survival of the favorite newspaper prevail, as it used to on Major Andre Field's railroad?