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.
THE FRONT DOOR OF THE NEW WORLD.
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.