The misgovernment of the cities is the prophecy of misgovernment of the nation; just as the paralysis of the great nerve-centres means the palsy of the whole body. There is graver danger to the republic in the failure of good government in our cities than arises from the moral corruption which accompanies that failure. The misgovernment of our cities means the 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, which is embodied in the Union; the second is the principle of local self-government, which places the business of the states and the towns in the hands of the people who live in them. Both of these are vital principles. The republic has survived the attempt to subvert one of them. It has just entered on its real struggle with a serious attack upon the other. The fate, therefore, of the American Republic may be bound up with the fortunes of Greater New York. CHAPTER III. ST. TAMMANY AND THE DEVIL. Hitherto, the city government of New York has not been a credit to the Republic; otherwise I should not be publishing a survey of the way in which New York has been governed as “Satan’s Invisible World Displayed.” The title, of course, is an adaptation, not an invention. The original holder of the copyright was one Hopkins, of the seventeenth century, who, having had much experience in the discovery of witches, deemed himself an expert qualified to describe the inner history and secret mystery of the infernal regions under that picturesque title. I have adopted it as being on the whole the most appropriate description of the state of abysmal abomination into which the government of New York had sunk before the great revolt of 1894 broke the power of Tammany--for a season--and placed in office a Reform Government charged to cleanse the Augean stable. The old witchfinder had no story to tell so horrible or so incredible as that which I have drawn up from the sworn evidence of witnesses exposed to public cross-examination before a State Commission in the City of New York. In the reports of the infernal Sabbats, for attending which thousands of old women were burnt or hanged in the seventeenth century, there always figures in the background, as the central figure in the horrid drama, a form but half-revealed, concerning whose identity even the witchfinders speak with awe. The weird women, with their incantations and their broomsticks, their magic spells and their diabolical trysts, are but the slaves of the Demon, who, whether as their lover or their torturer, is ever their master, whose name they whisper with fear, and whose commands they obey with instant alacrity.