THE GREAT MAGICIAN. Although the boughs be bare, and the

bent trees

Stretch out gaunt arms against a leaden sky;

Although the dreary landscape seem to lie

Beneath the hand of death, and the soft breeze

Of summer-time across the upland leas Be changed into a weary, haunting cry

Of storm-wind calling storm-wind to draw nigh

And rend to shreds our poor, frail refuges

Yet, through the gloom, Love comes, to touch my hand,

To bid me raise mine eyes, since he stood there

Waiting to still my fears, and make the land

Look like a garden of the Lord; so fair,

That, lo! red roses clothe the desert strand

Sweet summer's flowers-although the boughs be bare.

Chambers's Journal.

Kate Mellersh.

John Drinkwater.

THE WAIFS OF TIME.

When some great ship has long ago been wreck'd,

And the repentant waves have long since laid

Upon the beach the booty that they made,

And few remember still, and none expect,

The Sea will sometimes suddenly eject A lonely shattered waif, still undecayed,

That tells of lives with which an old storm played,

In a carved name that graybeards recollect.

So ever and anon the soundless sea

Which we call Time, casts up upon the strand

Some tardy waif from lost antiquity: A stained maimed god, a faun with shattered hand,

From Art's great work is suddenly set free,

And stands before us as immortals stand.

Eugene Lee-Hamilton.

The result of the New York Mayoralty election a few weeks ago was on the whole an encouragement to those who have refused to believe that the American experiment in democracy is eternally incompatible with good municipal government. Tammany, it is true, succeeded in carrying the Mayoralty, but it carried none of the minor offices, and for the next four years, having lost the control both of the purse and of the machinery of criminal prosecutions, its opportunities for graft and boodle, for blackmail and corruption, will be severely truncated. Even if the new Mayor elects to play the familiar Tammany game, his scope for doing so will be uniquely limited. He is in office, but there are many ways in which he is not in power. There remains to him, no doubt, the right of appointing the magistrates who preside over the lower courts and the right of appointing, and of dismissing at a moment's notice and without reason assigned, the Commissioner of Police. Both these privileges have been used in the past, and can still be used, to fill the Bench with political henchmen and to turn the police force into an instrument for raising revenue by the protection of vice and crime. But so long as all the appropriations for carrying on the city government have to be made through a Board exclusively manned by antiTammany representatives, and so long as the District Attorney is an official who looks upon the people and not upon the "machine" as his client, even a Mayor of the Tweed or Van Wyck type, one whose intentions and policy are wholly predatory, must find himself comparatively powerless for harm. There is some reason, moreover, for thinking that Mr. Gaynor will not prove Mayor of this type. Though

put forward as the Tammany candidate, he has never been a member of the "organization," and though he might fairly be described as that least pleasing of all the products of democracy, a sensational, notoriety-hunting, semi-political, and wholly unjudicial judge, he is also, oddly enough, a man of sincerity and independence, whose "respectability" was Tammany's greatest asset in the recent campaign. Whether the advantage of having him off the Bench is outweighed by the disadvantage of having him in the City Hall is a point that, not being a New Yorker, I do not feel called upon to decide. I think, however, that, so far as his erratic and explosive temperament and his lack of anything in the nature of administrative experience will allow him, he means to do well, and I shall not even be surprised if, making in part a virtue of necessity, he cuts himself clear of all Tammany influences and throws himself into the arms of his Reforming colleagues.

The outlook, therefore, till 1913, is about as bright as any New York has known for sixty years and more. What makes it all the more auspicious is that the substantial defeat of Tammany was effected in spite of the absence of any very glaring scandals. Given sufficiently stimulating revelations of sufficiently gross iniquities, given also a genuine unión of all the anti-Tammany forces, it has often in the past proved possible for the "good citizens" to snatch a narrow victory. But at the last election-and this although Tammany had been in office for six consecutive years-the Reformers were by no means so abundantly supplied as usual with the material for an indictment of Tammany rule. The material, no doubt, existed, but except

in three or four instances it could not be got at. This was partly because

the Mayor, Mr. McClellan, a son of the famous General, and a gentleman of the highest character and capabilities, had quarreled with the “organization" and held it in check, and partly because every year finds Tammany refining on its methods, and becoming a little more adroitly discreet. Except that a few of the minor officials had had to be removed by the Governor of the State, except that the finance of the city was inextricably confused, except that the Mayor, after appointing an honest and capable Commissioner of Police, and maintaining him in office for three and a half years, had suddenly dismissed him a few months before the election, and except that there was sufficient proof of waste and jobbery in certain departments and undertakings to justify the suspicion that Tammany was still the Tammany of old, the Reformers had comparatively little to work upon. They had enough, that is to say, to overthrow any party or government of the older world, but not enough to penetrate the tough civic conscience of New York. Nor were they at all points really united. The Republicans gave only a halfhearted support to their candidate, Mr. Bannard, and almost the whole brunt of the anti-Tammany campaign fell on Mr. Hearst, who, while running for the Mayoralty himself on an independent ticket, adopted, and urged his followers to vote for, all the other nominees of the Fusionists. The result showed that Mr. Hearst holds the balance of power in New York between Tammany and its enemies. The Mayoralty was lost to the "good citizens" because their votes were divided between Mr. Hearst and Mr. Bannard. They carried all their other candidates because Mr. Hearst had endorsed them.

This very sensibly detracts from the merit and value of their victory.

There is no stability in Mr. Hearst. He fights for and against every party in turn; and nothing is more likely than his appearance four years hence as a candidate for the Mayoralty, not in opposition to Tammany but as its adopted representative. When Tammany encounters a man whom it cannot suppress, its invariable policy is to annex him; and nobody who has followed Mr. Hearst's career can suppose that he has any insuperable objections to being annexed. While therefore, it is encouraging to find that the people of New York, even in a year of comparatively mild disclosures and with little or nothing in the nature of a moral uprising to spur them on, can fight a drawn battle with Tammany, the significance of their success becomes subject to some considerable discounts when one analyzes the chief factor that made it possible. And in any case one must remember that what New York accomplished at this election was essentially a work of destruction. It got rid of Tammany. But this is a feat it has frequently performed before, and always with the same result of Tammany regaining at the next election every inch of the ground it had temporarily lost. The whole history of municipal administration, not merely in New York, but throughout the United States, shows that while Americans can destroy they cannot construct. They can overthrow a bad Government; they have yet to prove they can sustain a good one. Some too flagrant scandal may rouse them for a moment to wreck a "machine" and to fill the air with good resolutions. But good resolutions are fleeting things, and the "machine" in the long run and under present conditions is indestructible. I do not say those are wholly wrong who see in the recent election a sign that New Yorkers, like the American people generally, are beginning to cut loose from

the domination of the "bosses" and to treat municipal government as primarily a business and not a political problem. But this movement will have to develop far more strength and constancy than it has done so far if it is to win more than a casual victory or to endanger Tammany's security at all permanently. The citizens of New York have won a respite of sorts for the next four years. But they have not won freedom or anything like it. Nor have they taken more than an uncertain and tentative step towards removing from the American democracy the reproach of its colossal and continuous failure to evolve a stable and decent form of municipal government.

Colossal and continuous are not, I think, harsher adjectives than the facts warrant. There is not a single large city in the United States-except Washington, where the people have no votes-that enjoys the least assurance of good civic administration. We think of Tammany as exclusively the disgrace of New York, but as a matter of fact scores of other cities in America possess Tammanys of their own under other names. A few years ago Mr. Lincoln Steffens, a sharp-eyed and fearless publicist, wrote a book called The Shame of the Cities. The cities of Mr. Steffens' title-page were six of the most prominent on the American continent-St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburg, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York-and their "shame" was their misgovernment through corruption. Differing profoundly from one another in history, interests, industries, and the type and character of their inhabitants, Mr. Steffens found them to be at one in their enslavement to rascally politics. All were ruled not by the people but by an oligarchy of special interests. This oligarchy was composed of (1) saloon-keepers, gamblers, criminals, and the organiz

ers of vice; (2) contractors, capitalists, bankers, financiers, company promoters, big merchants, and manufacturers who could make money by getting concessions and other public franchises more cheaply by bribery than by paying the community; and (3) politicians who seek and accept office with the aid and endorsement of the classes already mentioned. These three classes, Mr. Steffens went on to say, combine, and get control of the party machine. "They nominate and elect men who will agree to help them rob the city or the State for the benefit of themselves, and who will agree also not to enforce the laws in regard to the various businesses that degrade a community. We find under various modifications this criminal oligarchy in control of many communities in the United States. We find representatives of this combination in the United States Senate, among Governors of States, State legislators, mayors, aldermen, police officials. We find them among men in business life-captains of industry. bankers, street-railway magnates. In short, wherever franchises or contracts of any kind are to be secured from a community, we find leading citizens in the ring to rob their own neighbors, managers of corporations bribing lawmakers, lawyers for pay helping their clients to bribe safely, jurors refusing to render just verdicts." That is not, I think, an exaggerated picture. The alliance between organized wealth, organized vice and crime, and conscienceless political leadership is the determining and constant factor of American public life from the city to the Senate.

Americans used, complacently enough, to put their municipal disorders down to the immigrants, but the explanation hardly explains Philadelphia. Next to New York and Chicago, Philadelphia is the wealthiest and most important of American cities. It is also the most