Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete eBook
Washington Irving
The enlightened inhabitants of the Manhattoes, therefore,
being divided into parties, were enabled to hate each
other with great accuracy. And now the great
business of politics went bravely on, the Long Pipes
and Short Pipes assemblings in separate beer-houses,
and smoking at each other with implacable vehemence,
to the great support of the state and profit of the
tavern-keepers. Some, indeed, went so far as to
bespatter their adversaries with those odoriferous
little words which smell so strong in the Dutch language;
believing, like true politicians, that they served
their party and glorified themselves in proportion
as they bewrayed their neighbors. But, however
they might differ among themselves, all parties agreed
in abusing the governor, seeing that he was not a governor
of their choice, but appointed by others to rule over
them.
Unhappy William Kieft! exclaims the sage writer of
the Stuyvesant manuscript, doomed to contend with
enemies too knowing to be entrapped, and to reign
over a people too wise to be governed. All his
foreign expeditions were baffled and set at naught
by the all-pervading Yankees; all his home measures
were canvassed and condemned by “numerous and
respectable meetings” of pot-house politicians.
In the multitude of counsellors, we are told, there
is safety; but the multitude of counsellors was a
continual source of perplexity to William Kieft.
With a temperament as hot as an old radish, and a mind
subject to perpetual whirlwinds and tornadoes, he
never failed to get into a passion with every one
who undertook to advise him. I have observed,
however, that your passionate little men, like small
boats with large sails, are easily upset or blown
out of their course; so was it with William the Testy,
who was prone to be carried away by the last piece
of advice blown into his ear. The consequence
was that though a projector of the first class, yet,
by continually changing his projects, he gave none
a fair trial; and by endeavoring to do everything,
he, in sober truth, did nothing.
In the meantime the sovereign people, having got into
the saddle, showed themselves, as usual, unmerciful
riders; spurring on the little governor with harangues
and petitions, and thwarting him with memorials and
reproaches, in much the same way as holiday apprentices
manage an unlucky devil of a hack-horse; so that Wilhelmus
Kieft was kept at a worry or a gallop throughout the
whole of his administration.
CHAPTER IX.
If we could but get a peep at the tally of Dame Fortune,
where like a vigilant landlady she chalks up the debtor
and creditor accounts of thoughtless mortals, we should
find that every good is checked off by an evil; and
that however we may apparently revel scot-free for
a season, the time will come when we must ruefully
pay off the reckoning. Fortune, in fact, is a
pestilent shrew, and, withal, an inexorable creditor;
and though for a time she may be all smiles and courtesies,
and indulge us in long credits, yet sooner or later
she brings up her arrears with a vengeance, and washes
out her scores with our tears. “Since,”
says good old Boethius, “no man can retain her
at his pleasure, what are her favors but sure prognostications
of approaching trouble and calamity?”
