392 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



HOME RULE THE HOPE OF MUNICIPAL DEMOCEACY 



By OSWALD RYAN 



ANDERSON, IND. 



IF the final test of democracy in America is to come in the cities, 

 as Jefferson phophesied in his " Notes on Virginia," it would 

 seem that the test should at least be a fair one. Yet the municipal 

 machinery of the average American state permits anything but a fair 

 trial of the democratic principle. For, every student of contemporane- 

 ous municipal conditions knows that, barring those progressive com- 

 munities that have adopted some form of commission government, city 

 government is still cursed with the curse of divided responsibility, is 

 still in the hands of men who can not apply the rules of municipal effi- 

 ciency because they are bound by the rules of the partisan game. In 

 these cities men are still elected to office by national party organizations 

 without regard to questions of local policy, and men are still appointed 

 to municipal positions because of what they have done for their party 

 rather than because of anything they can do for their city. 



Deplorable as it is, the worst thing about this system of city govern- 

 ment is that it is not the free choice of the cities that are the victims of 

 it, but an imposition by an outside authority — the state legislature. 

 For, under the ordinary state constitution, the city is not, in theory of 

 law, a self-governing community, but a subject province exercising its 

 limited powers by sufferance of the state legislature, and having this or 

 that form of government as may be superimposed by the outside 

 sovereign. The municipality does not even possess the right to its own 

 existence; it exists only by grace of the state legislature, which, if it 

 pleased to do so, could withdraw its lease of life at will. 



Thus the city takes its right to existence, its form of government 

 and its governmental powers from the state, and what the state can 

 give the state can take away. The legal validity of any act by the city, 

 such as the issuing of bonds, the contracting for a municipal waterworks 

 or the granting of a municipal franchise, is not determined by the ex- 

 pressed desire of its citizens, but by the voice of the legislature as set 

 out in some statute. The real seat of municipal authority, therefore, is 

 not in the citizens, but in the state legislature; the city lives and moves 

 and has its being in the will of the state. . 



Under this system of constitutional law the cities exercise those 

 powers that are enumerated in the state legislature grants, and only 

 those powers. If the city wants to exercise a specific power of local 



