all private property. Accordingly, as impartial students of the Single Tax, we are required, in the first place, to form an estimate as to the actual distribution of land values in the United States; and, in the second place, to determine the relation of such values to our productive mechanism. There are many other points of subsidiary importance, but these alone are vital.

2. Evidence

COUNCIL GOVERNMENT VERSUS MAYOR GOVERNMENT 1

E. Dana Durand

WE are told that the American city council has proved itself in practice unfit to be trusted. Its powers have been taken away only because it has abused them. Whatever methods of election or of organization have been tried, it has been found impossible to secure good councilmen. The system of council rule worked well enough in the early days, with simple administrative problems and a comparatively high qualification for the electorate. But with the introduction of universal suffrage, the influx of foreign immigrants, the intrusion of party politics, and the growth of municipal functions, the system broke down completely. These statements are usually made as if they were self-evident commonplaces of history. Seldom is any detailed study brought to their support. But historical evidence must be handled with the greatest care in order to be conclusive. Failure rightly to analyze causes and effects and to take account of differences in conditions is apt to vitiate our reasoning. Not yet have we sufficient knowledge of municipal history or sufficient outlook into the future to justify dogmatic conclusions as to the relative success of council rule and mayor rule. A few considerations may be presented, however, which show how comparatively weak is this argument in favor of the mayor system from our experience in city government.

It is very generally admitted, nor need we stop to prove,

1 From Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XV. Reprinted by permission.

that up to the end of the third or fourth decade of this century American cities, which were then usually under the practically absolute control of the council, were more honestly and, in proportion to the technical advancement of the time, more efficiently governed than they are to-day. Indeed, the influence of the example of our federal Constitution must be looked upon as probably the chief explanation of the movement to withdraw executive powers from the council. In 1829 New York was already a very considerable city, having a population of more than 200,000 inhabitants. The city convention which met at that time was unable to advance charges against the municipal administration in the faintest degree comparable to those which are made every day against the government of our present cities possessing equal population. Nevertheless, some evils were found; and the natural remedy seemed to the charter framers, imbued with the principles of our national and state constitutions, to separate the executive from the legislative powers. But we have not the slightest proof that they correctly diagnosed the disease or prescribed the right remedy. From that time on, in fact, both council and administrative officers degenerated rapidly; and while this may be partly explained by the general lowering of the tone of politics and by the great influx of foreigners, no small share in the demoralization of the council, at least, was doubtless due to the weakening of its powers. After the still greater reductions in its authority by the charters of 1849 and 1857 and by the growing interference of the state legislature, the council fell yet more markedly in character. Each abuse of some remaining function was made the signal for the transfer of that function to the state government or to an independent commission.1 There was no attempt to concentrate the powers thus taken away from the council in the hands of the mayor, or indeed to establish in any way harmony of policy and centralized responsibility for action. The result was a municipal government so disorganized that inefficiency and corruption could not but increase appallingly. It was with

For fuller description of the process by which the council in New York was deprived of its powers and of the effects of that deprivation, see the writer's Finances of New York City, Chapters III and IV.

a view to bringing some order into this chaos that later legislation gradually placed the various branches of the city administration under the control of the mayor.

The history of the decay of the authority of the municipal assembly has been much the same in other cities as in New York, though the process has gone on with different degrees of rapidity and completeness in the various municipalities. We Americans too often fail to seek and to root out the funda

mental causes of our political evils. We rush for some external palliative, some patent nostrum. Not one of the steps by which our city councils were robbed of authority was taken on the basis of careful study of political principles. Each was a makeshift remedy for an immediate ill. Nor was there usually the faintest evidence that any of the better results which occasionally followed such changes were feally due to them. No form of government could, under the conditions then any more than now, give thoroughly good administration. Had the council been left with the main authority, we should undoubtedly have had poor enough government; but there is no certainty whatever that it would have been better under the most thoroughgoing one-man sway. We have, indeed, every reason to believe that a continuation of the earlier council rule would have been better than the system which actually became established in most of our cities during the years from about 1840 to 1880-a system characterized by hopeless diffusion and confusion of power and responsibility, legislative as well as executive, among state legislature, council, mayor, and well-nigh independent administrative officers and boards. Every candid thinker must admit the truth of this statement; yet we are too prone to forget that the form of government for whose evils concentration of power in the mayor was introduced as a remedy was very far from being genuine council government. Infinitely better is it to centralize authority and responsibility than to scatter and dissipate them; but it does not immediately follow that it is better to centralize them in one man than in a representative council. Because council government was not perfect and because mayor government has been more satisfactory than the hodge-podge which preceded it, many have drawn the quite

unwarranted conclusion that rule by the council is necessarily and always inferior to rule by the mayor. We have at present in the United States no city where the council is the one controlling power, so that comparison of this system with the system of one-man government, both working under similar conditions, is impossible. Some approach toward the council system is, indeed, found in a few of our cities; and in those where the council has the greatest power, such as Minneapolis and Atlanta, the integrity and efficiency of the administration, according to competent local observers, compare most favorably with those of other American cities.1 But it cannot be pretended that this evidence constitutes a strong argument in favor of the council system-any more than the experience of other cities with corrupt councils or with mayors, good or bad, is conclusive as to the best form of city government. There has been far too little method in American municipal experiments, and far too little scientific recording of their results, for us to hope to gain much information from our municipal history.

The fallacy of the line of reasoning which we have been criticising is aggravated by the fact that, in pointing out the results which have come from centralizing power in the mayor, no account is made of the growth of public sentiment demanding better government and compelling the choice of worthier men for office-men who would have made improvement in the administration under any form of organization. Flagrant abuses from time to time stir up the "good citizens," who are always in the majority, if they will only act and act together. A wave of reform overturns with the same sweep forms and individuals; for the American reformer is never content unless he tinkers the governmental machine at the same time that he puts new men in charge of it. The improvement which comes perhaps solely from the change of men is then attributed primarily to the change in form. That this is a fairly correct description of what has taken place in recent years in some American cities which have introduced the mayor system seems to be evidenced by the fact that the character

1 Minneapolis Conference for Good City Government, p. 93; Baltimore Conference, pp. 96-101.

of the government has often been but temporarily improved after the change, or at least has fluctuated with the rise and fall of the reform spirit among the citizens. It is too early to judge finally the practical working of the system. Undoubtedly there has been some permanent increase in the interest of the people in municipal government and in their devotion to the civic welfare, and this fact will tend in itself to give us a higher level of city administration. But the path of one-man rule is not all rose-strewn. Many bad mayors have got into power and, by the abuse of their immense prerogatives, have given administration scarcely equalled in extravagance, inefficiency, and corruption, during the worst periods of the earlier régime. Nor have the people always been able, as they should have been, according to the theory of the one-man system,-by at once placing the blame where it belonged, to overthrow the unworthy ruler and establish an upright one in his stead. The untrammelled mayor, with his enormous patronage, his control of the election machinery, his ability often to conceal from the public the true character of his administration, has not unfrequently succeeded in securing reëlection for himself or triumph for his ring. Only a few instances of the unsuccessful working of mayor rule can be cited from among the many whose existence any candid student of recent municipal history must admit.

It must be confessed that Boston has for the most part elected efficient and upright mayors during recent years, but other cities have not been so fortunate. In New York City the prominence of the mayoralty has at times driven even Tammany Hall to put up good men, such as Grace and Hewitt. But within this very decade, in the face of the growing reform sentiment, that organization has elected to the mayor's chair for two successive terms an "illiterate and obscure man" who filled all vacant offices with "adventurers of the lowest character"; while under the rule of his successor, also elected by Tammany, a legislative investigating committee unearthed in the police department scandals such as scarcely any other civilized city has ever known.1 The first election under the

1

E. L. Godkin, "The Problems of Municipal Government," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, IV, 857.