PART III.
Hamstrung Cæsarism as a Remedy.
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.
