SATAN’S INVISIBLE WORLD DISPLAYED [Illustration: THE CITY HALL, NEW YORK.] SATAN’S INVISIBLE WORLD DISPLAYED OR, Despairing Democracy. _A STUDY OF GREATER NEW YORK._ BY W. T. STEAD, AUTHOR OF “IF CHRIST CAME TO CHICAGO!” “Inasmuch as no government can endure in which corrupt greed not only makes the laws but decides who shall construe them, many of our best citizens are beginning to despair of the Republic.”--EX-GOVERNOR ALTGELD, _Labour Day_, 1897. The “Review of Reviews” Annual, 1898. EDITORIAL OFFICES: MOWBRAY HOUSE, NORFOLK STREET, LONDON, W.C. PUBLISHING OFFICE: 125, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C. LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. PREFACE. For the past four years I have devoted the ANNUAL of the REVIEW OF REVIEWS to a romance based upon the leading social or political event of the year. This year I intermit the publication of the Series of Contemporary History in Fiction in order to publish a study of the most interesting and significant of all the political and municipal problems of our time. To those who may object to the substitution of a companion volume to my Chicago book for their usual annual quantum of political romance, I reply, first, that “changes are lightsome” and a novelty is attractive, and, secondly, that nothing that the wildest imagination of the romance-writer could conceive exceeds in startling and sensational horror the grim outline of the facts which are set forth in this survey of that section of “Satan’s Invisible World” which was brought to light by the Lexow Committee. The trite old saying that “Truth is stranger than Fiction” has seldom been better exemplified than in the story of the way in which the Second City in the World has been governed, unless it be in the consequences of the resulting despair. For if the revelations made before the Lexow Committee are almost incredible, the deliberate decision of the ablest and most public-spirited Americans that there is no way of escape save by the hamstrung Cæsarism of the Charter of Greater New York is still more marvellous as a confession of the shipwreck of faith. Sin, when it has conceived, bringeth forth Death, and the corruption that rotted the administration previous to 1894 has only brought forth its natural fruit in the adoption of a bastard Bonapartism of the Second Empire as the best government for the First City in the American Republic. The election of the first Mayor for Greater New York, which is progressing while these pages are being written, gives a special actuality and interest to this study. But its permanent value does not depend upon the issue of the _plébiscite_ which has decided who will sway the destinies of the Second City of the World at the eve and on the dawn of the Twentieth Century.