CHAPTER II.

THE SECOND CITY IN THE WORLD.

A pandemonium of type-writing machines--of gigantic type-writing machines driven by demons who never tire--in some vast hall of Eblis. The clank of the type, the swish of the machine, the quick nervous ring of the bell, all indefinitely multiplied and magnified, fill the vast space with a reverberating clangour. This clangour continuously increases until its very vibrations seem to become clotted and fill the air with a sound that can be felt in every pore. It is like the pressure of an atmosphere so dense you can almost cut it with a knife, an atmosphere that is never still, but perpetually frets, and moans, and snarls with feverish unrest.

How many machines there must be to crowd the air with this million times multiplied misery of click and clang--ring-ring--ring-ring--and clang and click, that never stops, but rises and falls, rhythmless and rude, like the waves of a choppy sea on a rocky beach! Now and again through the infernal hubbub there pierces a dreadful wail,

As it were, one voice in agony Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills All night in a waste land, where no one comes Or hath come since the making of the world.

How hot the air is! a temperature of the antechamber of Tophet. As the perspiration bursts in great beads of moisture from your brow, you hear the faint hum of circling wings, faint at first, but ever growing shriller and more acute--hiss, zip--as the invisible fiend circles round his prostrate victim. Hiss, zip, nearer, louder than before, audible clearly even above the metallic storm of the type-writing machines. And as the mosquito settles on your ear, you awake with a start and suddenly realise where you are.

You are not in even the outermost circles of Dante’s “Inferno.” You are trying to sleep in the heart of Central New York, in the midst of all the thunder and the rush and the roar of her million-crowded streets, along which surges as a restless tide the turbid and foaming flood of city life. The bells of the tramcars continually sounding, the weariless trampling of the ironshod hoofs over granite roadway, the whirling rumble of the wheels, the roar of the trains which on the elevated railways radiate uproar from a kind of infernal firmament on high, all suffused and submerged in the murmurous hum that rises unceasing from the hurrying footsteps in the crowded street, that inarticulate voice of New York--

Sad as the wail that from the populous earth All day and night to high Olympus soars.

And that dreadful shriek is the farewell of an Ocean liner sounding a sonorous note with stentorian lungs as it quits the wharf.

There is nothing like it in London. Chicago, with all its bustle, has nothing to compare to this harsh metallic clangour of struggle and strife--although there the mournful death-tolling bell on the locomotives which thread the streets supplies a note of pathos and of awe that is missing in the racket and roar of New York.

One grows used to it in time, just as after a few days you become used to the thrust and swirl of the screw which drives the liner across the sea. The great ship vibrates in every nerve of steel, and the state-room throbs with the thud of the engines. So the great city pulses with strenuous power, and in the multitudinous uproar of its streets we hear the sound of the friction of the two-million manpower engine which has made even Lesser New York one of the greatest driving forces of the American Republic.

It is a dynamo of the first order. And like the dynamo it is instinct with magnetic power. All great cities are great magnets, and New York is the greatest--but one--in the world.

The figures of the portentous growth of cities in our epoch recall the familiar story in the “Arabian Nights Entertainments” of the vessel which, sailing too near the Loadstone Mountain, was whelmed into sudden destruction. For the attraction of the loadstone was such that all the iron nails in the vessel were drawn out of their fastenings, and the timbers that were once a ship became mere flotsam and jetsam on the water. It is a wild and romantic fable in the mouth of the Princess Scheherazade; but it is grim reality in the world to-day. For the great city is to the rural population exactly what the Arabian loadstone mountain was to the heedless sailor who came within the range of its fascination. All the iron in the rural ship of State is attracted to the mighty Babylon. The men with iron in their blood, the girls whose pulses leap and tingle with the eager flush of adventure and ambition, desert the village and the farm to crowd the roaring mart and glaring street. The country is denuded of its most vigorous children. The city engulfs into its insatiate maw all those the brightest, the bravest, and the best.

The process goes on at an ever accelerating ratio. As Mr. Godkin has well observed:--

Parks and gardens, cheap concerts, free museums and art galleries, cheap means of conveyance, model lodging-houses, rich charities, such as every city is now offering in abundance to all comers, are so many inducements to country poor to try their luck in the streets. They are the exact equivalents, as an invitation to the lazy and the pleasure-loving, of the Roman circus and free flour which we all use in explanation of the decline and fall of the Empire. They are luxuries which seem to be within every man’s reach gratis, and they act with tremendous force on the rural imagination.--_North American Review_, June, 1890.

The percentage of urban to the total population of the United States, defining as urban all dwellers in cities of more than 8,000 population, was 3·35 in 1790. Forty years later it had doubled. But in 1860 it was 16·13, and in 1890, 29·12. But the growth of the cities which alone deserve the name of great has been still more phenomenal. In 1840--not sixty years ago--the ten greatest cities of America contained a total population of 711,652. To-day Brooklyn alone, which has been merged as a kind of suburb in Greater New York, has a population of a million, while the ten great cities, to be hereafter known as the Great Ten--New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco, Cincinnati, and Cleveland--had in 1890 a population of 6,660,402, and will have in 1900 a population of eight millions. In fifty years the population of the United States did not quadruple itself, for it only expanded in round numbers from 17 millions to 62½ millions. But the great cities increased themselves nearly ten-fold in the same period, and to-day they contain 11 per cent. of the whole population of the Union. The latest estimate of the present population of the country gives the cities 25 millions out of the 72 million citizens of the United States.

If one-third of the inhabitants of the American Commonwealth dwell in cities, these urban centres possess even more than one-third of the wealth of the nation, and far more than one-third of its actual power. A writer in one of the recent American magazines points out that the wealth of the Great Ten in 1890 exceeded the wealth of the whole country, cities included, in 1850. The revenue of the same Great Ten amounted in 1890 to £25,000,000 per annum, a greater sum than was raised for State purposes in all the federated States and Territories. The annual Budget of New York and Brooklyn in 1890 dealt with ten millions sterling, a sum almost exactly equalling the Budget of the United States forty years ago.

It is now half a century since De Tocqueville wrote:--“I look upon the size of certain American cities, and especially upon the nature of their population, as a real danger which threatens the security of the Republic.” Since then this “real danger” has gone on increasing at an ever accelerating ratio. When De Tocqueville wrote, there were only three or four cities with a population over 100,000. To-day there are thirty. And most remarkable fact of all, the population of Greater New York is now equal in number to the total population of the United States at the time of the Declaration of Independence. Her 3,200,000 inhabitants exceed nearly four-fold the total number of the inhabitants in all the cities in the States at the time De Tocqueville visited America. In the State of New York, sixty per cent, of the inhabitants live in cities; in Massachusetts, seventy per cent.

This tendency townwards, which is one of the most striking characteristics of the English-speaking race all round the world, is nowhere more conspicuous than in the United States; and New York, of all American cities, is that where this centripetal law is just now seen to be operating most powerfully. In the amalgamation by which the Greater New York has come into being we have the latest manifestation of the craving on the part of all modern men to come together in ever-increasing agglomerations of humanity. The fissiparous tendency so perceptible in politics is not visible in cities. There are numerous instances of two cities fusing into one; but no city having once achieved its unity splits it up. Amalgamation, not separation, is the order of the day. Where a river does not divide--as for instance, in the case of Gateshead, that “long, narrow, dirty lane leading into Newcastle-on-Tyne,” or in the case of Salford--the larger town invariably swallows up its minor neighbours, as a large raindrop on the window-pane attracts the smaller drops in its immediate vicinity. In the case of Greater New York, not even the dividing river has been able to prevent the law of gravitation doing its will.

The City of New York is indeed seated upon rivers, and if State boundaries had not stood in the way, there is little doubt that Jersey City would have shared the fate of Brooklyn and Long Island. But even without Jersey City, the new urban conglomerate will be the second city of the world in populousness and greater even than London in area.

The City of New York has an area of 39 square miles, while the area of Greater New York is over 300 square miles. Brooklyn contains 29 square miles, Staten Island comprises nearly 60 square miles, Westchester County annex has an area of about 20 square miles, and the Long Island townships included in the scheme have an aggregate extent of perhaps 170 miles.

At the first election for the Greater New York, held this year, no fewer than 567,000 citizens were registered as electors in this colossal constituency. The Greater New York charter divides the city into five boroughs. (1) Manhattan, consisting of the island of Manhattan, and the outlying islands naturally related to it. (2) The Bronx, including all that part of the present City of New York lying north of the Harlem, a territory which comprises two-thirds of the area of the present City of New York. (3) Brooklyn. (4) Queen’s, consisting of that portion of Queen’s County which is incorporated into the Greater New York. (5) Richmond; that is, Staten Island. The population of the City of New York which before the amalgamation was close on 2,000,000, is now swollen to 3,200,000, of whom nearly 2,000,000 live in tenement houses.

The size of New York is by no means its most notable distinction. Chicago some day may, by right of its more central position, win the prize of being recognised as the real if not the political capital of the United States. But the position to which Chicago aspires has, for nearly a century, been held by New York. For New York is one of the few cities in the States which are not of yesterday. Of course, compared with London, which dates back to the Cæsars, New York is but a mushroom upstart. But as in the realm of the blind the one-eyed man is king, so in the New World a city which can count its history by centuries may be regarded as possessing quite a respectable antiquity.

To us in the Old World it is the window through which we look into America. Peter the Great built his capital on the Neva in order to have a window from which he could look into Europe. New York serves much the same purpose. It is through the window-pane of New York that the Old World sees what little it does see that is going on in the American Republic. All the newspaper correspondents of the European press without a single exception, so far as I know, cable from New York. Not a single British newspaper has a correspondent at Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, or Washington. As for the suggestion of publishing telegrams from New Orleans or San Francisco, it would be more reasonable to expect to see despatches from Mars. This leads, no doubt, to much misconception. The New York window is by no means of transparent crystal. Those who consent to see the United States solely through their New York window-pane will often be egregiously misled. Nevertheless, the fact remains that New York is the only window through which the Old World peeps into the New.

Nor is that the only special reason why New York is better known to us of the older branch of the race than any other part of the American Continent. New York is not more the only window than it is the only door of the New World. The Atlantic is furrowed by a thousand keels, but all the liners steer for New York. Steamers no doubt ply to Boston and to Philadelphia, but the great trade route--the only passenger route--lies past Sandy Hook. New York is the front gate of the Western hemisphere. Even Canada finds it more convenient to use the New York entrance than the ice-blocked mouth of the St. Lawrence. Hence, whatever else the Old World man may see or fail to see in the New World, the one place he is certain to see, the one place which he cannot avoid seeing, is the Queen of the Hudson.

And as New York is the first American city which every traveller sees, and the last which he leaves, so New York has attracted a greater number of European residents than any other city, with the doubtful exception of Chicago. In 1888, thirty-six per cent. of the citizens were either Irish or of Irish descent. The German element was in 1891 estimated at twenty-five per cent. In the City of New York the indigenous American only numbers twenty per cent.

But it is not its imported population which makes it so peculiarly European. Chicago is at least as cosmopolitan, but the city on Lake Michigan counts herself much more American than her sister on the Hudson. During the last Presidential Campaign New York was constantly singled out for attack by the Bryanite orators of the West and South as if it were a foreign and hostile colony encamped on American soil. Wall Street, the centre of the financial system of the United States, was as sound on the currency question as the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, and the advocates of Free Silver confounded New York and London alike beneath their savage anathema. Community of interest begets community of ideas, and the Western men angrily declare that New York is no more a typical American city than London or Liverpool. This is an exaggeration, no doubt. But neighbourhood counts for something, and New York is a thousand miles nearer to London than to Chicago.

New York is only six days’ steaming from Europe. It is the centre from whence the mighty shuttles ply back and forth across the Atlantic, weaving the ocean-sundered sections of our race into one. Of the threads, some end at Southampton and others at Liverpool. But they all start from New York.

There is another distinctive element about New York. It is the great literary producing-centre of the American people. Boston has long since been dethroned. No other city has even ventured to contest the primacy of New York. There is not a single magazine printed in America that has any circulation outside the United States which is not edited, printed, and published in New York. The advantages of a more central position enjoyed by Chicago are as nought compared with those which New York enjoys in other ways. When I proposed to publish the American _Review of Reviews_ in Chicago, I was promptly silenced by the statement that with the exception of the _Ladies’ Home Journal_ there was not a single periodical published outside New York which could claim to have achieved a success. New York, from the publishing point of view, is the hub of the American universe. Her magazines, admirably edited and marvellously illustrated, circulate in every nook and corner of the English-speaking world. The magazines of the other cities are virtually unknown outside the Republic, and often, it may be said, outside the city that gives them birth. New York, then, as the window and front door of the United States, with an unchallenged financial, commercial, shipping and literary ascendency, has the pull over all her rivals. To nine-tenths of mankind New York is America. All the rest of the country is but the pedestal upon which New York stands.

This pre-eminent position carries with it a grave responsibility. If the world at large judges the American Commonwealth by New York, then New York owes a double duty both to the American Commonwealth and to the world at large. Hence the extreme interest which the latest evolution in the civic development of New York naturally arouses. This Greater New York--what does it mean? How did it come into being? What were the issues at stake at the late Election? All these questions every one is asking. I propose to attempt to supply some answer.

It is a task of some difficulty and no little importance; for not merely is New York--rightly or wrongly--regarded as the most typical and best known American city, but the United States tends more and more to become not a federation of States and territories, but an association of huge cities. The Great Ten not merely include within their boundaries nearly eight million persons, or more than ten per cent. of the whole population; they do the thinking and the guiding and the managing of a very large proportion of the remaining nine-tenths. Draw a circle with a three-hundred-mile radius round the Great Ten, and you inclose an area which is practically dominated by the Ten and educated by their newspapers. The Newspaper Area is a phrase not yet naturalised in geographies, but it is the most real and living area of all those into which the social organism is divided. For the newspaper collects its news every day, and sells its news every morning and evening, thereby creating a living, ever-renewed bond between the dwellers within the radius of its circulation infinitely superior to the nexus supplied by the tax-collector and the policeman. It is not difficult to define the length of the range within which a newspaper can create a constituency. It is rigidly limited by the distance from the printing-office in which a newspaper can be delivered before breakfast. After breakfast the influence of the newspaper dwindles every minute. Any one living so far off as not to be able to obtain his newspaper before dinner is practically outside the pale--unless, of course, he lives remote from any local centre of news distribution. In that case the range of influence is almost indefinite, as is shown to this day in the hold which the weekly _New York Tribune_ exercises over farmers scattered everywhere between the Atlantic and the Rocky Mountains. But speaking generally, the range of the Newspaper Area is limited by breakfast-time.

Greater New York has come into being in order to increase, not to diminish, the influence of New York in the Republic and in the world at large. This influence may be for evil. “Under the new charter,” says Mr. W. C. De Witt, Chairman of the Committee which drafted that document, “the City of New York at one bound becomes the mistress of the Western hemisphere and the second city of the world. It should be to its people what Athens was to the Greek, Rome to the Romans, Florence to the Florentine--an object of constant solicitude and of civic pride.”

The question whether they intend to obey the voice of their friendly mentor is one on which the future fortune of the American Commonwealth will largely depend. For, as Mr. J. C. Adams pointed out in a thoughtful article on “The Municipal Threat in National Politics,” which he contributed to the _New England Magazine_ in July, 1891:--

The misgovernment of the cities is the prophecy of misgovernment of the nation; just as the paralysis of the great nerve-centres means the palsy of the whole body. There is graver danger to the republic in the failure of good government in our cities than arises from the moral corruption which accompanies that failure. The misgovernment of our cities means the break-down of one of the two fundamental principles upon which our political fabric rests. It is the failure of local self-government in a most vital part. It is as great a peril to the republic as the revolt against the Union. For the republic is organised upon two great political ideas, both essential to its existence. The first is the principle of federation, which is embodied in the Union; the second is the principle of local self-government, which places the business of the states and the towns in the hands of the people who live in them. Both of these are vital principles. The republic has survived the attempt to subvert one of them. It has just entered on its real struggle with a serious attack upon the other.

The fate, therefore, of the American Republic may be bound up with the fortunes of Greater New York.