Few men have been more prominently before the public for the last thirty years than ex-Judge Whiting. The march of events connected with our municipal progress and politics and its varied measures of reform in this time, bringing to the front, as it naturally did, the younger and more daring, impulsive and sinewy element, have succeeded in keeping him in the background. The greater effort to keep him down only inspired in him greater energy of will. Regarded by many as of the Don Quixote school of enthusiasts, and fighting windmills, he yet fought with a lustiness of purpose and honesty of determination that elicited commendation of his heroic endeavors, though often fruitlessly expended in what plainly foreshadowed itself as a hopelessly lost cause. Fighting against odds was his element. No number of defeats daunted him. Pushed under at one point he rose to the surface elsewhere, as fiery, impetuous, determined as ever. These remarks apply more particularly of course to the time, so to speak, when he was in the zenith of his reformatory measures. For the past two or three years he has enjoyed comparative obscurity - an obscurity, however, more his own election than the result of the strenuous opposition he had to combat. There was a good deal of the Timon of Athens in his nature. The soubriquet "Little Bitters," applied to him, was the popular recognition of his strongly dominant trait. Embittered like Timon, and his confidence in political integrity shaken, if not wholly lost, he voluntarily exiled himself from political strife.
