Be it carefully observed that I limit the collapse of democracy to that application of the principle which has hitherto been regarded as natural and almost invariable. Democratic government, as defined by Abraham Lincoln, “government of the people, for the people, and by the people,” has in English-speaking lands, and nowhere more so than in New England, been regarded as the government of the community by an elective assembly--that is to say, representatives chosen by the different localities meet together in a common council which is entrusted with authority to manage the affairs of the community. The House of Commons is the most familiar type of such a democratic assembly, but every town council in the land is based on the same principle. Nor is it only in Britain that this principle has been applied. It has hitherto prevailed wherever democracy has been adopted as the system of government; whether in the French Republic, in the German Municipalities, or in any and all of our Colonies, the same principle invariably reappears. The centre of authority is the elective assembly, composed of representatives of the wards or districts or constituencies into which the city or community or nation has been divided. [Illustration: 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.