428 



MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATION 



and renewal, so bewildering and so capricious in frequency of repeal 

 and in violence of sudden resort from one device to another, totally 

 different, that it becomes more difficult in many instances to follow 

 the structural changes of government in a moderate-sized American 

 town than to grasp the whole administrative history of municipal 

 corporations for England or for France. 



In theory, the municipal corporations are minor divisions or enti- 

 ties of the state, but in many cases then* relative importance is so 

 great that they are not held in proper subordination. Under these 

 circumstances the state lacks power to legislate wisely and on stable 

 and permanent lines for its growing and assertive municipalities. 

 On the one hand, the great town disturbs the even tenor of the life 

 of the commonwealth; on the other hand, the rural commonwealth 

 fails to understand the needs of the great town, and attempts in 

 futile and vexatious ways to hamper it and circumscribe its powers. 



Thus to meet local or temporary exigencies, rather than to serve 

 the abiding ends of good administration, there is constant meddling 

 with charters and change of method and system. All American 

 cities, however, have some form of an elective municipal council. 

 In a few instances these councils have power almost as complete as 

 in England, in most others much less power, and so on to the vanish- 

 ing-point. Nearly all American cities have been at one time or 

 another the complete victims of an attempt to separate the so-called 

 legislative from the executive function, in oversight of the fact that 

 practically the whole work of a municipal corporation is adminis- 

 trative, and that the enactment of by-laws is a very minor detail. 



Practically everywhere throughout the United States the cities 

 provide themselves with a mayor elected by the whole voting body. 

 In many cities the mayor has very small actual power; in many 

 others he appoints and removes all heads of departments, controls 

 the police system, and runs a sort of periodic autocracy. In many 

 American cities, the different departments of administration are 

 farmed out to boards and commissions. In some places these boards 

 are elected by the people, in others they are appointed by the mayor. 

 In still others they are chosen by the municipal council. Yet more 

 frequently they come into being through ingenious combinations of 

 all these methods. 



It is useless to try to generalize, or to attempt, for purposes of 

 description, to work out of all our varying forms some average sort 

 of arrangement that we might call the American system. Yet some 

 creditable attempts have been made in this direction, and a body of 

 excellent theoretical, legal, and practical students of the subject, 

 organized as the National Municipal League, has worked out a so- 

 called model charter, which is having no slight degree of influence 

 upon charter-framers and legislatures, as from year to year they go 



