A VIEW IN BROADWAY.
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.
CANDIDATE VAN WYCK IS SAID TO HAVE POLLED THE SOLID VOTE OF THE CYCLISTS OF GREATER NEW YORK.
MR. SETH LOW.
First Tsar-Mayor of Brooklyn.