as any Americans can they abstain from "hustling." Something of English quietude has passed into their manners and mode of life and ways of doing things, and even into their recreations-Philadelphia is the only place in America where cricket really flourishes. The inhabitants number about a million and a quarter, and it is their boast that more of them own the houses they live in than is the case in any other American city. Prosperity is constant and pervasive; the schools are admirable, and the old Quaker atmosphere of sobriety, steadiness, and simplicity is still an unexhausted force. If any city by its or igins and fortunate conditions seemed destined to set America an example of good government it was, one would have thought, Philadelphia. Yet, as a matter of fact, Philadelphia has for years been in the grip of a "machine" compared with which even Tammany might plume itself on its decency and moderation. When Mr. Steffens examined its conditions some six years ago, he declared it to be not only corrupt, but contented in its corruption. The contentment, since then, has come to a stop. There has been a rising of the "good citizens," a fierce revolt against the "machine," and the usual short-lived triumph of the Reformers. But nothing lasting or fundamental has been accomplished. Long years of corruption and inefficiency on the part of the politicians culminate in some public and intolerable iniquity; there is a moral awakening of the people, a titanic struggle, and a victory for de

cency; a year or two later the politicians, somewhat chastened perhaps, come back into their own; and people sleep contentedly till the next scandal. That is the familiar spectacle of municipal government in America-a routine of professional graft tempered by occasional outbursts of amateur rage. In neither respect is New York unique. The metropolis of America, in its recurrent struggles with Tammany, does no more than duplicate on a more inposing stage the experience of every other city in the United States that is sufficiently wealthy and populous to be worth looting by the politicians and their allies.

It is not, after all, unnatural that municipal government should be the weakest point of the American system. Mr. Seth Low, in the admirable chapter he contributed to Mr. Bryce's American Commonwealth, was right in claiming that the difficulties which confronted his countrymen in the sphere of city government were altogether exceptional. European cities are invariably growths whose roots go far back into the past. Even if they expand with overwhelming suddenness -as London, Berlin, and Rome have expanded during the last three decades -their development has always been from a pre-existing nucleus of wealth, experience, and established administrative conditions. But the American cities are creations, not growths. They are the creations of the Legislatures of the different States in which they are situated. From these Legislatures they receive a charter of incorporation in which their form of government, their powers and their limitations are as a rule microscopically prescribed. Few charters in the United States are more than ninety years old, and the American cities, in consequence, instead of being the oldest administrative entities in the country, are the youngest. Again, they have grown on

a scale and with a rapidity to which the history of no European city affords any true parallel; and they have done so under circumstances of unique complexity. They were raw, or comparatively raw, to municipal work; they had no margin of accumulated wealth to draw upon; they had no governing class; and they were flooded with illiterate and inexperienced immigrants from Europe, whom, nevertheless, they were driven by their political theories to include in their body of citizenship. Americans had, in short, to build up their cities practically out of nothing, to assimilate the aliens in their midst, and at the same time to attempt the experiment of a society governing itself; and to do all this they were compelled to discount their future on a grandiose scale and to adopt the most wasteful and extravagant of all policies that of producing under pressure the quickest possible results. That they showed in those early days a regrettable shortsightedness is true enough, but the conditions they were called upon to deal with were such as would have baffled the most expert administrators.

Those conditions, so far as they were physical and financial, still obtain in portions of the South and of the Far West; but they are faced and encountered with far more providence and practicality than formerly. The new Western cities have profited by the experience of the East, are imbued with a keener sense of the city as an organic whole, and provide themselves with the raw material, and also with the accessories, of a well-ordered community in the most liberal fashion. Broad and beautiful streets, plenty of parks and recreation grounds, publicly owned services of street-cars, of electric lighting and of water supply, and a definite and spacious scheme of future growth-such things as these are giving many a Western city an auspi

cious start in life. On the other hand, the legislative conditions that surround the upbuilding of an American municipality still present an almost insuperable obstacle to reform. That is to say, almost every American city sull receives its charter and the framework of its government from the State Legislature; and the State Legislature, in which as a rule farmers predominate, has usually little idea of the needs of city administration, frames charters that are conceived more in the interests of the politicians than of efficient government, and cannot be kept from amending them as it pleases. Hardly a city in America has home rule or anything like it, and a great part of every Mayor's time is spent in warding off political attacks upon the city charter or in seeking from the Legislature fresh powers for solving unanticipated problems. There is no more favorite occupation among the politicians in the State Legislature than that of amending city charters and of passing innumerable bills regulating the detailed conduct of civic affairs. The result is, first, that scarcely any city official is able to say, amid all this multiplicity of statutes, what his powers are; and, secondly, that the members of the State Legislature practically hold the city at their mercy. In the old days, when there was hardly a detail of municipal administration that the State Legislature could not and did not manipulate as it chose, "cities were compelled by legislation to buy lands for parks and places because the owner wished to sell them; compelled to grade, pave, and sewer streets without inhabitants, for no other purpose than to award corrupt contracts for the work; compelled to purchase, at the public expense, and at extravagant prices, the property necessary for streets and avenues, useless for any other purpose than to make a market for the adjoining property thus im

proved; and laws were enacted abolishing one office and creating another with the same duties in order to transfer official emoluments from one man to another, changing the functions of officers with a view only to a new distribution of patronage, and lengthening the terms of offices for no other purpose than to retain in place officers who could not otherwise be elected or appointed." Matters have somewhat improved of late years, but the authority and vagaries of the State Legisla tures still dissipate the sense of local responsibility, still favor the politicians at the expense of the Reformers. and still oppose a most formidable barrier to sound government.

It goes without saying that in a country so utterly under the curse of politics as is the United States, municipal elections are fought out on Presidential lines, and often, indeed, take place on the same day as the polling for State and Federal offices. In spite of the progress of civil service reform, the spoils of the city offices still go to the victors in sufficient abundance to make far-reaching policies and stable and continuous administration all but impossible. Politics have penetrated into every detail of municipal work. Cliques of politicians in both parties manipulate the electoral machinery which has been so bewilderingly overorganized and elaborated that the average busy, well-intentioned, but not over-earnest citizen finds himself hopelessly entangled in its toils. He is as a rule an extremely domesticated person; he has no tradition of public service to counteract the intensity of his home life; the indifference of most American women to public questions, and their lack of anything in the nature of such a political education as an Englishwoman absorbs unconsciously from girlhood, still further tend to tie him to his hearthstone; his individual interest in good government is usually

infinitestimal; and he is not attracted by a game in which his butler and his groom and the policeman on the beat are far more proficient and cut altogether a more effective figure than himself. So long as the ordinary American regards municipal government as a political rather than an administrative problem, so long as he would rather see it bungled in the name of one of the regular parties-even if it be not his own party-than carried on with honesty and efficiency by "good citizens" and Independents, and so long as politics remain a trade requiring the whole time and thought of professional experts, so long will American cities be administered with only a passing reference to their own interests and with a constant eye to the interests of the dominant "machine."

Then, again, the views, theories, and instincts that together shape the attitude of the average elementary American towards the problems of governmen are of a kind that tell with peculiar effect against municipal efficiency. He has retained longer perhaps than any white man on the civilized globe the fierce pioneer spirit of individualism. His deepest political conviction is probably that the less there is of government the better. So long as government protects him in the enjoyment of his personal and property rights, he asks no more of it. He is only just beginning to grow into the large civic consciousness. He is only just beginning to acquire some conception of a régime powerful for positive as well as for negative ends, and of a community organized and using its collective strength and energy for purposes of constructive and universal beneficence. The impulse to make of municipal administration an agency for the active promotion of the common welfare has thus been largely lacking in him. Moreover, many of his ideas about democracy, whether right or

wrong when applied on a large scale. come heavily to grief in the special and restricted sphere of civic government. Americans have always been too apt to regard the suffrage as the essence of democracy. So long as they could vote at recurring periods for a multitude of short-term officers, they have persuaded themselves that little more was needed to fulfil the amplest ideal of popular government. They have always had a tendency to look upon the ballot-box as an end in itself, to think more of success at the polls than of efficiency in office, to regard the problems of government as solved when they had elected one set of candidates to office in preference to another set, to spend their energies on choosing their representatives and then to forget to watch over them, to pay too much attention to who is to do the work and too little to how it is being done, and to sleep with the comfortable assurance of a public duty adequately performed from the eve of one electionday to the dawn of the next. They have never properly realized that democracy is criticism, is control, is an alert and informed public opinion, and is not really machinery at all. Whenever anything has gone wrong, their instinct has been to put it right by some purely mechanical readjustment, some legislative expedient. some amend ment of the external accessories of government. "For every evil, no matter what its nature," writes Professor Rowe in his excellent Problems of City Government, "we recur to the statute book. There is a widespread belief throughout the country that for every abuse there is a legislative remedy. This belief in the moralizing power of the law is one of the most insidious as well as one of the most corrupting influences in our public life. It leads us to place unenforceable laws on the statute books, and the disregard of these laws becomes the

instrument of blackmail and bribery."

A political philosophy so defective as all this would in any case be illequipped for grappling with the concrete and positive problems of city government. But in the United States it has been placed at this further disadvantage, that city government has not been organized to deal with city affairs. When Americans began casting about for a form of municipal constitution, they took for their model the principal features of the system they already found at work in the State and in the Union. Regarding the city as a smaller State, a microcosm of the Republic, and ignoring or, rather, not even suspecting, its peculiar needs and requirements, they proceeded to endow it with the form of Government to which they were accustomed in State and Federal politics. They separated the executive from the legislature in the best spirit of the eighteenth-century Constitution-mongers. They imposed a bi-cameral Council to correspond with the House of Representatives and the Senate at Washington. They introduced into the civic framework all the checks and balances, all the dispersal of powers, all the rivalries of competitive authorities, that have converted the American Constitution into an ingenious conspiracy for doing nothing. They insisted on electing hordes of municipal officials by popular vote, on denying them any fixity of tenure, and on replacing them by new men after each election-and all because these were the methods they were used to in State and Federal affairs. Putting upon universal suffrage a strain it could not, and was never meant to bear, they endeavored to head off the results of their rashness by reducing the elected officials and bodies to an equality of impotence. "By pitting the executive against the legislative authority," says Professor Rowe, "by electing one official to exer

cise control over another, and by making official terms as short as possible, we have beguiled ourselves with the illusion that it is possible to construct a machinery of government which only requires the attention of the people at stated election periods." The great majority of American cities are still struggling to escape from this system -a system under which an elected Mayor, armed with the power of veto, divides with the Council the responsibility for policy and appointments.

The pathway which they believe will lead to emancipation is one of considerable interest to political students. They have tried the English system of making the Council practically omnipotent, and in the absence of a permanent official staff, and in the presence. the overwhelming presence, of "politics," they have found it disastrously unworkable. They have tried making the Mayor and the Council authorities of equal or co-ordinate powers, and they have found that under this system abuses flourish in profusion. while the responsibility for them remains nebulous. They are now in despair turning towards a plan that restricts and virtually annihilates the Council, and vests either in the Mayor or in a small board of executive officers the supreme power. This is a development which translates into terms of politics the concentration of authority which has revolutionized the conduct of American industries. Nothing has been more remarkable than to watch the steady decline of American faith in legislative assemblies and the corresponding elevation of executive power. The popular view of the President's functions is that he is in the White House to save the nation from Congress. The popular view of a Governor of a State is that he stands between the people and the people's representatives, to protect the former and bridle the latter. Everywhere through

out America the tendency is to call in autocracy to safeguard democracy against itself. In no other way do Americans see a chance of fixing responsibility and holding their elected officers to account.

This tendency was first applied to municipal government by the citizens of Galveston, a sea-coast town in Texas. Galveston was all but wiped off the map by a great storm in 1900, and the inadequacy of the existing.administration to cope with the disaster was made abruptly apparent. The people determined to reorganize their whole system of government with a single eye to efficiency. The State Legislature, in response to their petition, granted the city a new charter, under which all power was vested in a Commission of five men-the Mayor and four managers of particular departments-elected not by wards but by the city at large and at a time when no other election was in progress, and holding office for two years. The Mayor has no power beyond his vote as a Commissioner. Each Commissioner must come to the board for authority to act, and a majority vote is final. The business of the city is divided into four departments—(1) finance and revenue, (2) police and fire, (3) streets and public property, (4) waterworks and sewage-and at the head of each is a Commissioner, who is solely responsible for the personnel and policy of his department. The plan has worked admirably. It has attracted the best men to the service of the city; it has stimulated a healthy pride and interest in their activities; and it has eliminated politics. The Commission found the city bankrupt and in six years raised its credit above par. It has saved over a third of the running expenses and has incurred no debts; it has built a great sea wall four and a half miles long and seventeen feet above the Gulf; it has broken