It is bureaucracy pure and simple. I am not ready to assert it positively, but I am of the impression, from some knowledge of the subject, that the very shadowy municipal assemblies provided some years ago for St. Petersburg and Moscow had a greater legislative and financial authority than the new municipal assembly of the Greater New York; and I am inclined to believe that neither in the administration of those Russian cities nor in the administration of the Russian provincial governments will one find a bureaucratic system so complete and so indirect in its responsibilities to the public as the bureaucracy which the Greater New York charter creates. There is no necessity to go further. I have quoted enough to justify the title of “Despairing Democracy”; for here we have a democracy in such depths of despair that it first emasculates its elective assembly, and then hamstrings its Cæsar. [Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE LIMITS OF GREATER NEW YORK, AS DEFINED BY THE MUNICIPAL CONSOLIDATION INQUIRY COMMISSION.] [Illustration: MR. W. R. HEARST. Editor and Proprietor of the _New York Journal_.] CHAPTER IV. GOVERNMENT BY NEWSPAPER. Twelve years ago I employed part of the leisure I enjoyed in the safe retreat of Holloway Gaol in writing an essay on “Government by Journalism.” In that essay, which was published after my release in the _Contemporary Review_, and subsequently republished under the title “A Journalist on Journalism,” I expounded a theory as to the natural and inevitable emergence of the journalist as the ultimate depository of power in modern democracy. One passage I may be permitted to quote, as it bears directly upon the subject of the present chapter:-- The future of journalism depends almost entirely upon the journalist, and at present the outlook is not very hopeful. The very conception of journalism as an instrument of government is foreign to the mind of most journalists. Yet, if they could but think of it, the editorial pen is a sceptre of power, compared with which the sceptre of many a monarch is but a gilded lath. In a democratic age, in the midst of a population which is able to read, no position is comparable for permanent influence and far-reaching power to that of an editor who understands his vocation. In him are vested almost all the attributes of real sovereignty. He has almost exclusive rights of initiative; he retains a permanent right of direction; and, above all, he better than any man is able to generate that steam, known as public opinion, which is the greatest force of politics.