DEMOCRACY AND PERSONAL RULE. T HE Greater New York Charter Bill
has received the signature of the Governor of New York State and has therefore become law. It brings into legal existence a city of more than three millions of people, so that New York now exceeds the population of any European city save London. In actual area Greater New York is larger than London, although in the newly annexed part of the north along the Hudson much is still in a semi-rural state. How rich and powerful this huge community is may be inferred from the fact that the assessed value of property in the city is some £600,000,000. The truth is that New York, like London, is rather a big City-State than a mere town in the ordinary sense. If it were cut adrift, as the then secessionist Mayor of New York proposed in the early days of the Civil War, this great city would make an almost respectable second-class Power. It is of great interest, therefore, to see how it is proposed to con- duct the government of this huge city under the new Charter of incorporation, especially in view of the past record of New York municipal government. The scandals of that government have been at times so monstrous as to engage the attention of the civilised world, and to cause the friends of democracy to hang their heads in sorrow and disappointment. For, if there was opportunity to plunder before, the amounts to be stolen now are indefinitely larger. Indeed, the New York of Tweed's day was almost a country town com- pared with the great municipality of to-day. The annual expenditures of the new city government will, we are told, exceed those of the State governments of all the sea- board States from Maine to Florida. " What a city to sack I " as Blucher observed when he passed through the comparatively small London of over eighty years ago.
To the Englishman, with his fixed idea of representa- tive government embodied in some collective authority, such as the House of Commons in national affairs, or the Town Council as a whole in municipal matters, the start- ling fact of the Charter of Greater New York will be that it clothes the Mayor of the city with powers such as nobody here would dream of proposing for any British official, whether elected or no. The Mayor of New York will have under this Charter both executive and legis- lative power of an enormous extent. Indeed, during his term of office, which is to run, it is worth noting, four years, the Mayor will enjoy almost absolute power, within the limits laid down by the Charter. He is to possess a veto over nearly all expenditure, which can only be over- come by a five-sixths majority of the City Council. This Council cannot increase any items of expenditure for current expenses. Those are to be all determined by the Board of Estimate and Apportionment, the members of which are, with one exception, appointed by the Mayor, who has the right of sitting with them. The first Mayor of the city, to be elected next November, will even have greater powers entrusted to him, for he will be called on to make appointments to heads of departments and to boards, of persons who cannot be dismissed by his successor, but who will hold office for eight years. In short, when once elected, the Mayor of New York will be a kind of civic Emperor, whose authority, within the limits of his sphere of action, will be greater than that of most of the Monarchs of Europe within theirs.
If New York were the same corrupt city, steeped in an all but hopeless slough, that it was in the days of the Tweed Ring, it would be terrible to contemplate the immense power thus concentrated in the hands of a single man, who might plunder the community for four years unless he were " removed " by that system of assassination which has been said to temper a certain despotism. But there can be no doubt that a vigorous movement for municipal reform is in progress in the United States. The basis of the movement is everywhere the same—to take municipal matters "out of politics "- i.e., to make efficiency rather than party cries the criterion for municipal service. Even in Chicago, which long dis- puted with New York for a bad supremacy in civic corruption, we observe a great change for the better. At the recent municipal election there, all parties adopted the reform " platform," and the Civic Federation, which embodies the reforming energy of the city, has declared that the new Mayor is satisfactory from the reforming point of view. The same civil service reform which has now become so extended in the Federal Civil Service is beginning to be carried out in the leading municipalities, so that party appointments will soon be the exceptions rather than the rule. This is encouraging, but the English observer will still wonder why, in order to carry out reform, it should be thought necessary to give such enormous powers into the hands of individuals as are now committed to the hands of the Mayor of New York.
It is plain that American democracy is proceeding on different lines from those on which we are working here, in regard to the political forms. It is not only a question of Republicanism as compared with Monarchy, it is a question of personal rule as against the rule of collective bodies. The personal system runs all through the United States. The President is entrusted with immense powers by the Union as a whole. The Governor of each State m his sphere has similar large authority. And now we see the principle carried out in an even more thorough way in regard to the Mayor of a great city. Indeed, the Mayor of New York will be to the City of New York all, and even more than, the President is to the United States. The principle, as we say, runs all through. In the House of Representatives the Speaker is clothed with powers that no House of Cemmons would ever dream of conferring on its Speaker, and, what is more, he uses them, and is supported by the country in doing so, with- out hesitation. In nearly every American city it is now the custom to take such important matters as the control of public parks and gardens, of the city police, of street-cleaning, out of the hands of the collective repre- sentative body, and to put them into the hands of responsible individuals. When the police scandals of New York woke the citizens from their normal apathy, and a great sweep took place of all the Tammany men, the new Mayor put into the vacant Commissionership of Police a young man of great vigour and of high culture, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, who at once began to wield powers which London has not been used to see for centuries in one man's hands. It is plain that the tendency in the United States, whether in Federal, State, or city government, is towards a kind of one-man rule. By this we do not mean Imperialism or tyranny, for the- ruler is elective and responsible. What we do mean is, that the American people seem determined to get Carlyle's "able man" into office, and to give him a free hand.
Thus democracy is, in point of fact, working out very differently from the purely a priori conceptions entertained a century ago by its early enthusiasts. The American Constitution, when made, was denounced by the followers of Jefferson as having set up something like a monarchy, and thereby as having undone the fruits of the revolutionary struggle. Democratic theorists in this country, like Godwin, conceived of an almost Anarchist Commonwealth in which, as the Socialist leader in Germany, Herr Bebel, put it, the. government of persons would be replaced by the adminis- tration of things. What democracy in actual working in the most democratic countries seems, on the contrary, to be making for, is very strong personal rule, strictly within the constitutional limits no doubt, and under the ultimate sanction and authority of the people, but yet strong rule by a single person. Indeed, a rooted distrust of representative bodies seems to be all but universal in America, and, we think, is growing in France, as the adoption of the Referendum shows it to have grown in Switzerland. American experience seems to indicate that the elected member of a large body which has collective power is less efficient and more likely to be open to corrupt influences than is a single person chosen ad hoc. In England we are not altogether escaping this experience, for it cannot be doubted that the authority of the House of Commons is not what it was during a middle-class suffrage. But here it is the Cabinet which is gaining at the expense of the House of Commons, that is to say, one collec- tive body is partly superseding another, the Premier not occupying any commanding position unless he is a cow mand- ing personality. Direct authority in England is partially veiled, except in the case of the Judge. You cannot, either in national or local matters, put your finger on any one individual and say, There is the real government. But in the United States this is just what can be done alike. in Federal, State, and municipal affairs. All through the individual is clothed with great and direct power, for the exercise of which he is responsible not to an elective body, but to the community. It is true that there has been criticism of the powers given the Mayor under the new Charter, but, on the whole, New York seems to be content. What are the reasons for the divergence between English and American tendencies in this respect ? Why would nobody dream of conferring such powers on the Chairman of the London County Council or the Lord Mayor of Liverpool as will be conferred under universal suffrage on the Mayor of New York ? Partly, we think, because of the fact of a more limited suffrage here, democracy itself in its extreme forms running to personal rule. Partly because we have a leisured class willing to serve the community for the love of the thing, while in America, outside of the older New England cities, this is hardly yet the case. The average man is immersed in the routine of daily business, he has no time to carefully watch the doings of his elected representatives, and he thinks the chances of purity and efficiency are greater when a single person has to explain and justify to the people what he has done. In the last place, it seems to us evident that the American method is a logical development of the early ideas with which the American Republic began its career. The theory of Montesquieu as to the absolute division of executive from legislative authority led the American people to make each power independent, so that the interpenetration of both which has resulted in our Cabinet system, with our Parliamentary control over that system, has been impossible in America. And when it has come to the actual problems of a complex and vast democracy, the single person has proved more really representative and vastly more honest than the collective body. Therefore, as it was impossible to combine the two, as in England, without a kind of political revolution, it has been left to a sort of natural selection to decide that the single person must increase, while the collective organ must dwine away.
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