Satan's Invisible World Displayed or, Despairing Democracy

e, the swish of the machine, the quick nervous ring of the bell, all indefinitely multiplied and magnified, fill the vast space with a reverberating clan

st cut it with a knife, an atmosphere that is never still, but

ring-ring-ring-ring-and clang and click, that never stops, but rises and falls, rhythmless and rude, like the

, one voic

n, like a win

waste land, whe

ince the makin

gs, 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, aud

estless 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 o

l that from th

ight to high

f an Ocean liner sounding a sonorous note

llic clangour of struggle and strife-although there the mournful death-tolling bell on the locomotives whic

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 st

s instinct with magnetic power. All great cities are great

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 a

er accelerating ratio. As Mr

nducements 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 explan

tion 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

t 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

g 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 Declarati

ion 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 in

le doubt that Jersey City would have shared the fate of Brooklyn and Long Island. But even without Jersey City, th

lyn contains 29 square miles, Staten Island comprises nearly 60 square miles, Westchester County annex has an area of a

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 port

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 C?s

er I

ic. 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 de

and 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 convenien

pean 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

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 thei

ply back and forth across the Atlantic, weaving the ocean-sundered sections of our race into one.

PANES OF THE WINDO

ouse Squar

ich 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 cor

erican 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-wh

ctically 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

DOOR OF TH

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 t

of the American Commonwealth will largely depend. For, as Mr. J. C. Adams pointed out in a thoughtful article o

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

can Republic may be bound up with