CHAPTER I.

DESPAIRING DEMOCRACY.

Despair is a strong word, nor can the citizens be rightly said to despair of the Republic while they are still engaged in making energetic efforts for its salvation. In the strict sense of the word, therefore, it is absurd to speak of a despairing democracy, which is still struggling to avert its threatened doom. But for democracy in the English sense of the word there is no longer any struggle in the City of New York. The ablest and the most hopeful Americans have given it up as a bad job, so far at least as city government is concerned. Hence, it is no misnomer to speak of Despairing Democracy as the natural and, perhaps, inevitable consequence of the display of “Satan’s Invisible World,” a few hints and glimpses of which have been afforded in the preceding chapters.

It seems but the other day that Mr. Andrew Carnegie flaunted before the eyes of his former countrymen the magnificent achievements of the principle which in city government is already abandoned in despair. Who could have imagined when reading the exultant pæan chanted by this American Scot over the achievements of “Triumphant Democracy” in the Western Republic, that within a very few years we should be called upon to chant a dirge over its grave in the first city in the United States.

Such an assertion will, no doubt, startle many readers both in the Old World and the New. It will be vehemently contested, chiefly by those who are too deeply immersed in the roaring eddies of the fight to be able to appreciate the significance of the drift of the current which is sweeping them free from their ancient moorings. But outsiders proverbially see most of the game. It is in no spirit of exultation, but rather with a feeling of profound regret, that I note the course which the law of evolution seems to be taking in the great cities of the Western World. That regret is chastened and subdued by two considerations. The first is based upon the belief in the providential government of the universe. The second, which is more personal to myself, is the fact that for nearly twenty years I have been engaged in an attempt to compel hidebound devotees of parliamentary government to admit the virtue that is latent in the Russian autocracy. I am no bigot of Constitutionalism, neither am I guilty of the arrogant folly of pronouncing judgment upon expedients the adoption of which the ablest and wisest men in other lands deem to be indispensable. But the most sympathetic observer, after he has made all allowances, cannot ignore the salient fact of the situation, which is that by universal consent of the ablest and most practical citizens in the foremost city of America, democracy, in the ordinary sense of the term, has hopelessly and irretrievably broken down.

Be it carefully observed that I limit the collapse of democracy to that application of the principle which has hitherto been regarded as natural and almost invariable. Democratic government, as defined by Abraham Lincoln, “government of the people, for the people, and by the people,” has in English-speaking lands, and nowhere more so than in New England, been regarded as the government of the community by an elective assembly--that is to say, representatives chosen by the different localities meet together in a common council which is entrusted with authority to manage the affairs of the community. The House of Commons is the most familiar type of such a democratic assembly, but every town council in the land is based on the same principle. Nor is it only in Britain that this principle has been applied. It has hitherto prevailed wherever democracy has been adopted as the system of government; whether in the French Republic, in the German Municipalities, or in any and all of our Colonies, the same principle invariably reappears. The centre of authority is the elective assembly, composed of representatives of the wards or districts or constituencies into which the city or community or nation has been divided.

Of course, I shall be told, and justly told, that this system of what may be called parliamentary or municipal democracy is by no means the only form through which democracy can give effect to its will. This, of course, is perfectly true, and that was why I was so careful to limit and define what I meant by democracy. There is no danger of my forgetting that democracy can exist without the usual parliamentary or municipal apparatus. Russia, although governed autocratically, is nevertheless one of the purest democracies in the world. Neither can any Englishman who lived through the Second Empire in France forget that the Third Napoleon always maintained that the Empire was the true and natural outcome of modern democracy. Nevertheless, although the Tsar of Russia rules over a democratic nation, and the Third Napoleon regarded himself as the armed guardian of French democracy, the conventional conception of a democracy in English-speaking lands has never been that of a community governed by an autocrat, but always of a community in which the centre of power lay in the elective assembly. It is this conventional theory of democracy which has been thrown overboard in New York. Hence, from the point of view of the parliamentarian or the conventional believer in government by an assembly of elected persons, the Charter of Greater New York, under which the first election has just taken place, is a more melancholy spectacle than even “Satan’s Invisible World Displayed,” with all its saturnalia of debauchery, violence and corruption. The Charter of Greater New York is the direct outcome, the natural fruit of the bitter experience of Tammany rule. Once more, to quote the familiar saying, “Sin when it hath conceived bringeth forth death,” and the sin revealed by the Lexow Committee has brought forth a deadly harvest in the Charter of Greater New York. Deadly, that is, inasmuch as it is fatal to the principle of vesting the government of the people in the elected representatives of the people in public council assembled. For the central principle of the Charter of Greater New York is the substitution of the authority of a Tsar-Mayor for what has hitherto been regarded as the natural authority of an elected council.

This is not a sudden and unexpected change. The evolution of an elective autocracy has been in progress for some years, but it has never before been brought into such conspicuous prominence as by the Charter of Greater New York, for that Charter is the formal embodiment in black and white of the central principle of the Second Empire, with certain modifications which accentuate rather than diminish the expression of democratic despair, of which it is the embodiment. It is this evolution of Bonapartism, of an elective dictatorship, based on universal suffrage, which is the most startling phenomenon of modern politics in the United States. The Third Napoleon never claimed to reign by divine right. His authority was based upon a mass-vote of the electors of France. His throne, although propped by bayonets, was seated on universal suffrage, and in theory he asserted, and in practice in the last years of his reign adopted, the principle that this autocracy, which originally sprang from a mass-vote of the people, needed to be renewed and confirmed from time to time by a _plébiscite_ of the whole nation.

The government of Greater New York, as it has been established by the Charter under which the recent election took place, is simply the Second Empire of France re-established in the first city of the American Republic, with the limitation that the reign of the despot shall be rigidly limited to four years, after which he shall not be eligible for re-election until the expiry of another term of an equal duration. That this in no sense is an exaggeration, but a simple literal statement of facts perfectly well known in the United States, I shall shortly proceed to show; but before doing so it is well to note some of the circumstances which led up to this extraordinary evolution of autocracy on Republican soil.