A FREER CITY-A PLEA FOR MUNICIPAL HOME

THE

RULE.

HE municipal problem is upon us. The development of the past century has been a municipal development, whether we consider it from the point of view of statistics or functions. Lord Rosebery, in a recent speech at Swansea, forcefully expressed the situation when he said:

"I suppose that in a great manufacturing and industrial town like this you have a great many merchant princes, leaders of business and the like, and I suppose that when they read their rate papers they shrug their shoulders and curse with some volubility. I have no sympathy with men in that position, who complain of their rates, and do not take their share of the municipal burden. I think there are two plain and obvious duties which are inherent in every British citizen and subject. The first is to take part, if necessary, in the defence of the country, and in the second place not to avoid or to shirk any public or municipal duty which may fall upon him. I believe it to be the plain and obvious duty of every man of capacity, education and public spirit to try and take part in the government of the place in which he lives. I wish that my voice could reach far beyond Swansea; I wish it could extend to every municipality in the kingdom, and impress upon every man, however high his position, however great his wealth, however consummate his talents may be, the importance and nobility of municipal work. There is no town council that has not done more to be seen in this past year than Parliament has done in the past year. The councillor can walk about and see the operations of the council to which he belongs, and moreover, he can, in the bosom of the council itself, nourish fresh schemes of practical improvement, which he knows will be carried out if they are voted; and he can also see that they are carried out in the most efficient way. I do not think our people understand how much larger and more noble and more useful this municipal life is going to become. Year by year it grows and grows, I think out of proportion to the growth of the importance of the Imperial Parliament. Each year men are more and more engrossed in the work of their own locality, in developing their own locality, in making that locality more useful, more beautiful, and a better place for men and women to live in. Well, I hope that that is an object worthy of man's ambition. There is no man too great to serve in those capacities, and if I

could leave one grain of seed by the roadside when I go away this afternoon, it would be the precept that no man in Swansea, however eminent or great he may be, would neglect the burden, the responsibility and the happiness of municipal work."

The very size of cities and their prominence in our national life make their government a matter of the first importance; and the fact that they have been until quite recently almost uniformly inefficiently if not corruptly governed, makes the problem one of immediate and imperative importance.

It is not my intention to describe the phases of the situation. They have been so often and fully set forth that it is fair to assume that the average reader is familiar with them. The details may vary in degree from place to place, but not in kind.

Municipal government in America has more frequently brought the success of democracy into serious question than either the state or national governments. The difficulty experienced in the management of our cities has led observers and students of affairs, at home and abroad, to maintain that democratic representative government is a failure.

Two remedies have been urged with great persistency. First, that the affairs of a city should be managed on a business basis; secondly, that they should be considered separately and apart from state and national questions. By many these remedies are regarded as axiomatic; but before they are accepted finally, they should be carefully defined and considered.

If by the first is meant that the administration of city affairs is to be managed by business men, one must dissent from the proposition. If, however, it it meant that they must be managed as business affairs are, by specially fitted and trained men, then one may concur. In the past it has hastily been concluded that a successful business man could do anything, no matter how foreign it might be to his taste or habits. Business men as mayors, however, have not been uniformly successful, and the reason is not far to seek. Municipal administration is as much a profession as that of civil engineering or the law, and to take the average man, no matter how capable he may be in his chosen line of work and put him at work on this new line, and in unfamiliar surroundings, and then expect him to be successful, is unfair and absurd.

One cause of inefficiency in our municipalities has been our failure to recognize the distinction between administration and legislation. The former is a matter of business; the latter of policy, or politics if you choose. For the former we need men whose whole time can be given to it; who have demonstrated their capacity and fitness; who make of it a profession,-a life work. In the latter we need the judgment and experience which comes from the successful pursuit of an occupation; men who are not absorbed in details, but who will be interested in the broad, general features of the situation.

When once we grasp this fundamental distinction and apply it, we will have taken a long step forward. Civil service reform helps in this direction. It insists that a man shall be chosen to office because he has shown in some agreed-upon way that he can discharge the duties of that particular office. It does not concern itself with elective offices, which have mainly to do with questions of policy, although not to the extent that they should in a properly organized community, and this brings us directly to another difficulty of the problem, namely the multiplicity of elective offices, which introduces partisan politics into the selection of municipal officials.

We have heard much of the success achieved by British municipalities, and no small part of it is due to the fact that the British voter is not overburdened when he comes to the polls. He has just one official to elect, the alderman, and he can canvass the merits of the candidates for that office with great care and thoroughness. How different is the municipal voter in this country. In Philadelphia, for instance, he is called upon to select a mayor, tax receiver, a city treasurer, a controller, a city solicitor, forty-two magistrates, select and common councilmen, school directors and election officers, not to mention the county officials. In the face of this great array what does the average voter do? He falls back upon the judgment of the political organization with which he is affiliated, almost invariably the national party with which he is accustomed to vote. He substitutes its judgment for his. It nominates men for their usefulness to the organization; the needs of the city are of secondary importance.

At the time of the Revolution our forefathers feared the concentration of power in the hands of a single man. They saw what evils followed when that man was not responsible to any one for his actions. Favoritism, nepotism, corruption, inefficiency were the natural results. In the revolt from this condition they swung to the other extreme. Power was divided up among a great number of officials, all of whom were elected for short terms and on the principle of constant rotation in office. Added to this was a system of checks and balances which made our government, national, state and municipal, one of indirection. All this has strengthened the hold of the party and has well nigh deprived our cities of any power of self-government.

In the sense in which Lincoln used the words, we have had no "government of the people, for the people and by the people" in our municipalities. They have been made not only the pawns of party politics, but the playthings and experimental stations of inexperienced legislators.

The doctrine that a municipal corporation is the mere creature and agent of the state has worked hardship and disaster alike to state and city. The former has been tempted and succumbed to use its power and opportunity for partisan advantage. The latter has had the instinct and capacity for self-government weakened. As the Mazet Committee said a few years ago in its report to the New York legislature, "We have but a single recommendation to make, and that is that the people of New York City be permitted to govern themselves."

It is true that the municipality in a certain sense is the agent of the state and that therefore the latter should have some control over the city. The test of the "propriety or impropriety of any given instance of interference or control by the State in the local public policy" is described by the National Municipal League's "Municipal Program" to be, "does the local policy conflict with the general public policy of the state as determined by the policy determining authority of the state and which as such general policy is embodied in laws equally applicable to every part of the state?" If it does, the rights of the state are paramount, but they should be supervised, protected and enforced, not by the state legislature, but by a state administrative depart

ment.

Moreover if the city is within certain limitations the agent of the state, should it not be given a dignified position as such and treated with more consideration? Imagine, if you can, a great business concern sending out its agents and constantly revising and revoking their authority! It is questionable whether they could get men to represent them; and their business would certainly be in a state of chaos; and yet this is just what the state does in the matter of its municipal agents.

Does the average citizen realize how frequent and how pernicious is the interference of the legislature in local affairs. The Fassett Committee in New York in 1890 brought out the fact that for the preceding five years the New York Legislature had passed one thousand two hundred and eighty-four statutes relating to the cities of the State. The so-called Charter of Boston consists of seven hundred and fifty separate acts.

Bee, in an editorial two years ago, said:

The Omaha

"If an example were wanted to illustrate the demands made upon legislative time for charter-making, it can be found in the present legislature, in which there are probably in the neighborhood of a score of bills on the files of the two houses purporting to amend various sections of the Omaha charter alone, to say nothing of the numerous bills relating to the city governments of the smaller municipalities of the State. Many of these are really important to their respective localities to cure technical defects in the existing statutes, but it is impossible for the legislators to give them the necessary attention. If only to relieve themselves of this burden, the legislature should relegate the charter-making power to the people of the cities that have attained the requisite population."

The Cleveland Municipal Association, in its annual report for 1900, prior to the sweeping off of the Ohio statute books all special municipal legislation, said:

"So many measures affecting the government of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County were brought before the legislature that it was laborious to follow them. Nothing could more strongly emphasize the necessity of securing home rule for cities in Ohio than the course of the last legislature. It demonstrated that no form of city government can be considered stable so long as the provisions of the present Ohio Constitution, requiring uniform legislation for all cities, are ignored. During the entire period