The Scandal of the City Fire Engine

A great deal of uncalled-for crimination and recrimination, and a very unpleasant state of social intercourse between otherwise friendly citizens, has grown out of the circumstances of the purchase of a fire engine for the city under the administration of Mayor Gatzert. All of this unpleasantness might have been avoided by the exercise of that degree of forbearance and common sense which should characterize all intelligent social intercourse. The purchase of a fire engine was a measure almost unanimously concurred in by the citizens. No fault was found with the Mayor and Common Council for the purchase or the price paid. The Mayor paid for the engine by a draft on San Francisco, for which the city appropriated and paid the equivalent of $800 in gold coin, the cost price and charges amounting to about $500 in city scrip. Subsequently, an official report from the Sacramento Fire Department, from which the engine was purchased, credited to its treasury but $500 as received on said sale. When public attention was called to the fact that $800 in gold coin had been paid by the city and only $500 had been received by the owners of the engine, we do not think there was an intelligent man in this city who entertained the suspicion for a moment that Mayor Gatzert was at fault in the matter. No man stood higher in this community for public and private liberality, and for unswerving business integrity, than Bailey Gatzert. If he has lost caste in any of these particulars, he has only his own impetuous sensitiveness to blame for it. He held a voucher for all the money he had received from the city, which acquitted him of fraud, but did not end his responsibility. He owed the duty to himself and to the public not only to exhibit his voucher, but to explain how the discrepancy occurred. That man who accepts a public office with the expectation that his personal character will be accepted as a bar to criticism upon his official acts, makes a great mistake.