The Evening Telegraph

THE QUANDARY IN PHILADELPHIA.

From the N. Y. Tribune.

If an outsider might be permitted an anxious inquiry, When does Philadelphia hope to bring into the world those public buildings? The mountain has been so long in labor that even the sight of a mouse would now be grateful. Some years ago the city of brothers who love each other (Ahern, Haggerty, et al.) discovered that it stood in need of a new court house, prothonotary and clerks' offices, and immediately began a fierce and bloody internecine war as to the site. Since then New York has covered acres of ground with edifices that have grown grey and hoary with time. Cities have sprung up in the West, and become landmarks for pilgrims from all climes, but the battle of the calm Quakers still rages with unabated violence, and the first stone of those clerks' offices is yet to be laid. Curiously enough, the difficulty in the way of this city (which our readers will remember as an immeasurable flat of small brick houses) is want of room. The corporation is apparently not able to purchase ground, and is forced to use one of the squares which fond and enthusiastic Philadelphians are wont to invoke in their domestic poems as the lungs of the city. The question is, which lung will the city do without? Property holders look with greedy eyes upon the court-house that is to be, and summon all sorts of ghostly and malarious influences to drive it from other neighborhoods to their own.

The first proposal was to seize on Independence Square, so that when pilgrims from all parts of the country came up at the centennial to look for the sacred ground on which the nation had its birth, they might find it occupied with thieves and murderers in their dock, begirt with their surrounding cordon of political colleagues as policemen and counsel. Whether Penn himself, armored in his drab integrity from top to toe, rose and warned his degenerate descendants off the hallowed ground with a countenance more in sorrow than in anger, whether the bidding ran low in that neighborhood, we know not, but the bill was lost in the Legislature. Washington Square was haunted by the dead of a whole graveyard under it, who rose and shook their grey locks at the invading prothonotaries. Finally Penn Square was decided upon, and the long agony was over. The city breathed again. Trees fell, grass was rooted up, and the bit of country became a muddy lumber-yard, when the enemy rallied and attacked the Legislature with a proposal that the grass be resodded and the trees replanted, and that the buildings should go on the nation's birthplace, and Penn go finally to his own place, wherever that might be. With the weight of present Philadelphia justice upon him he would not be likely to rise again.

The cause was presented to the Legislature by a committee, and that venerable body waited with grave attention for the tinkle of that peculiar eloquence to which their convictions are always accessible. The young reporter who acted as spokesman, with the overweening confidence of impulsive youth, solicited their votes and offered them with outstretched hands, in return—his own most distinguished consideration. No other consideration was hinted at or whispered. It is needless to state that the Legislature became instantly oblivious to the presence of the committee or the young man. The war still rages; public buildings of gigantic proportions daily go up and are demolished in each morning's paper; the combatants scowl darkly at each other on the streets; but over the squares no sound of the hammer is heard. As erst in the grave of Alonzo the Brave, the worms they creep in and the worms they creep out.

What is to be done? Will no New York capitalist go to the relief of these distressed brotherly lovers? When the Centennial does arrive, and people from all nations lumber on her back, will our neighbor have no prisoner's dock to which she can point with pride, and say, "Here Justice presides, quite blindfolded. Behold my thieves' headquarters, the rendezvous of my favorite sons, where they obtain both honor and renown"?