If so, we shall expect to be asked to consider only facts brought in rebuttal. As man to man, marshalling fact for fact, let us sit down together and seek to sift this matter to the bottom. [Illustration: The Emperor Addressing First Imperial Klonvokation.] CHAPTER XI Our Cities a Menace to Democracy Referring again to the menace of the American city to American institutions, I desire to remind the reader of the thought of some of our most profound thinkers on the great problems of democracy. Some of these views expressed at different periods of our history were prophetic, and some of them were conclusions, as though the visions of the seers were being fulfilled. In the early days of the republic when there were no great cities in our country and when the tide of immigration had just begun to flow to our shores and settle in the growing centers along the Atlantic seaboard, Mr. Jefferson said, "The American city is a cancer on the body politic." He seemed to foresee, at the very beginning of the republic, the deadly poison of anti-democracy generated among the alien people congested in our cities. In 1866 Wendell Phillips, a powerful advocate of emancipation, said, after the great conflict was ended and the Negroes free, "The time is coming when the American city will strain the government as slavery never did." He, too, foresaw the virus which the city would spread to the entire nation, attacking and consuming the great principles of democracy upon which the republic was founded. In recent years, Lord Bryce, Ambassador of Great Britain to the United States, after years of study and careful investigation, wrote that classic entitled "The American Commonwealth." In this work there was much commendation of American institutions, but the book was not without candid criticism. He said that "the conspicuous failure of American democracy is in its great cities." The clear meaning of the eminent Englishman was that the American people remained really democratic only in the rural sections and the villages. Already conglomerate population from every clime and shore had destroyed democracy in our congested centers. Only recently Mr. H.G. Wells, one of the most conspicuous, progressive thinkers in the world, looked upon New York with its seething millions, heard its Babel of languages, felt its delirious fever, and then calmly announced that Petrograd in its rust and desolation was a picture of New York in the future. In our greatest city, this profound student of social and political life saw unmistakable evidence of the real and seething madness of Bolshevism which meant the overthrow and the utter collapse of all things democratic.