What an important year it was to be for us!  In the spring of 1883 the Brooklyn bridge was opened, and our church was within fifteen or twenty minutes of the hotel centre of New York.  I said then that many of us would see the population of Brooklyn quadrupled and sextupled.  In many respects, up to this time, Brooklyn had been treated as a suburb of New York, a dormitory for tired Wall Streeters.  With the completion of the bridge came new plans for rapid transit, for the widening of our streets, for the advancement of our municipal interests.  A consolidation of Brooklyn and New York was then under discussion.  It was a bad look-out for office-holders, but a good one for tax-payers.  At least that was the prospect, but I never will see much encouragement in American politics.

The success of Grover Cleveland and his big majority, as Governor, led both wings of the Democratic party to promise us the millennium.  Even the Republicans were full of national optimism, going over to the Democrats to help the jubilee of reform.  Four months later, although we were told that Mr. Cleveland was to be President, he could not get his own legislature to ratify his nomination.  His hands were tied, and his idolaters were only waiting for his term of office to expire.  The politicians lied about him.  Because as Governor of New York he could not give all the office-seekers places, he was, in a few months, executed by his political friends, and the millennium was postponed that politics might have time to find someone else to be lifted up—­and in turn hurled into oblivion.

That the politics of our country might serve a wider purpose, a great agitation among the newspapers began.  The price of the great dailies came down from four to three cents, and from three to two cents.  In a week it looked as though they would all be down to one cent.  I expected to see them delivered free, with a bonus given for the favour of taking them at all.  It was not a pleasant outlook, this deluge of printed matter, cheapened in every way, by cheaper labour, cheaper substance, and cheaper grammar.  It was a plan that enlarged the scope of influence over what was arrogantly claimed as editorial territory—­public opinion.  Public opinion is sound enough, so long as it is not taken too seriously in the newspapers.

The difference between a man as his antagonists depict him, and as he really is in his own character, may be as wide as the ocean.  I was particularly impressed with this fact when I met the Rev. Dr. Ewer of New York, who had been accused of being disputatious and arrogant.  Truth was, he was a master in the art of religious defence, wielding a scimitar of sharp edge.  I never met a man with more of the childlike, the affable, and the self-sacrificing qualities than Dr. Ewer had.

He was an honest man in the highest sense, with a never-varying purity of purpose.  Dr. Ewer died in the fall of 1883.