REPORT OF EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE lv 



attracted wide attention and have become classics in the literature of the sub- 

 jects with which they deal. 



His important and influential Congressional career began in 1874, when he 

 was elected to the House of Representatives. Reelected in 1876, he declined in 

 1878 to be a candidate ; but in 1880 he was again returned, and held his seat by 

 successive reflections until, in 1SS6, he was chosen Mayor of New York. 



His work in Congress was more profoundly important, perhaps, than has ever 

 been recognized. While he often differed with the leaders of his party, he was 

 always relied upon by them, and even by his party opponents, for wise advice 

 and intelligent information. In the reform of the consular service, the resump- 

 tion and maintenance of specie payments, the defeat of the "free" coinage of 

 silver, the establishment of the National Geological Survey, and the peaceful 

 solution of the Presidential electoral contest of 1876, his attitude and arguments 

 may be said to have been decisive factors. To the various tariff debates, he con- 

 tributed a business knowledge, sometimes distasteful, but always useful, to theo- 

 retic partisans. The successive Morrison, Mills, McKinley, and Dingley tariff 

 bills embodied, apart from their schemes of duties, administrative details which 

 he had furnished. He secured also the adoption of the extensive plan for the 

 improvement of New York Harbor, which since has been steadily prosecuted. 



In 1886 he was elected Mayor of New York City. To the duties of that office 

 he devoted with intense assiduity the powers which had been developed and 

 matured by a lifetime of varied experience ; and his administration, though 

 hampered by local partisan conditions, left behind it many beneficent effects 

 and many suggestions which have since borne fruit. Of these, one of the most 

 permanently important is the plan of municipal rapid transit which he devised, 

 and which, though at first ignored by the Board of Aldermen and smothered in 

 the legislature at Albany, was at last forced to adoption by the public sentiment, 

 and is now in process of execution. Its essential feature is that the work, con- 

 structed with the money, and actually the property, of the city, shall be leased to 

 a responsible corporation at a rental covering both the interest on its cost and a 

 sinking fund which will repay in fifty years the principal; so that, at the end of 

 that period, the whole rapid-transit system will be the property of the city, free 

 of all cost, even of interest ad interim, and of all obligations to any private or 

 corporate interest. A fairer or more ingenious method of dealing with a great 

 public franchise, without imposing burdens upon the present generation for the 

 benefit of the next, it would be difficult to devise. 



In April, 1900, the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York elected 

 Mr. Hewitt to honorary membership, in recognition of "his long and valuable 

 services to the city, State, and nation, and with special regard to his initiation 

 in this body, of the rapid-transit plan, under which the contract was awarded, 

 and the work is now proceeding. ' ' At the same meeting, a gold medal was 

 ordered to be prepared and presented to Mr. Hewitt, for his services in the cause 

 of rapid-transit under municipal ownership. 



For more than forty years from the beginning of the Cooper Union until his 

 death he was one of the trustees and the Secretary of the Board. During the 

 whole period he was practically the General Superintendent of the Institution, 

 and with great capacity and untiring devotion supervised its work and affairs 

 and devised and carried into effect plans for the extension of its usefulness. His 



