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guiding the course of business, enforcing the rules of the House, and protecting the rights of the minority, even of individuals, against the chronic tendency of the majority to oppression; and this with an impartiality amounting to indifference as to what may be the nature of the business in hand, or what party may be in the ascendency: while our Speaker, on the other hand, is a political partisan, elected by a party majority for party purposes, making up to suit that majority the committees which largely control legislation, using his power in the guidance of business to forward that which the majority favors, and is thus under a constant temptation to browbeat and suppress the minority of the opposite party; and that this situation unfits him for the important, indeed indispensable, function of a presiding officer. Now the Moderator of a New England town meeting is the only public officer in the country who corresponds to this attitude of the English Speaker, as any one may readily convince himself who will attend such a meeting on a spring afternoon. There are no committees to be made up. There are no parties to dispute the supremacy. The officer selected is a townsman known for his intelligence and skill in this work, and if sometimes some small private object seeks favor by supporting him it is of slight importance and merely temporary operation. A personal inspection of his work is well worth the time and trouble of any one who wishes to study the defects of our other government methods.

In the town government, again, is the only real example of the separation of legislative and executive power. The town meeting exists only for one afternoon, or at most two or three in the year. It then dissolves and the government is handed over entirely to the executive authorities till the meeting assembles again after another year. Yet so powerful is the check of direct responsibility, the necessity for those authorities of standing up

individually in the town meeting and undergoing crossexamination, not by an investigating committee appointed for party purposes by a party majority, but by single persons, who will be listened to only so far as they are seen to be aiming at the truth, that anything like serious defalcation or intentional maladministration may be said to be practically unknown among town officials.

Equally important is what may be called the compactness of the town business. While any inhabitant can with some assistance procure the insertion of an article in the warrant, nothing can be considered which is not there, so that there is no delay in proceeding to business, and every inhabitant knows beforehand what dangers he has to prepare to meet. The selectmen are present as the authorized guides of business representing the whole town. Some person moves to take up an article of the warrant by its number. If it is a routine item it passes without question. If anybody wants information he rises to ask the selectmen, the school committee, or other official. If the answer is satisfactory to the meeting the article is passed with little debate. Only on a few questions as to which there is a strong difference of opinion or interest does important discussion arise, and even then the decision of the meeting is very likely to be guided by the opinion of the authorities. And thus under the skilful and impartial guidance of the Moderator the business is conducted rapidly to a close. The writer heard a spectator state at such a meeting that it had done more business and done it better in one afternoon than the Massachusetts legislature frequently does in a session of six months.

There are some defects of system also in the town government. 1. The executive authority is lodged in a board of selectmen instead of a mayor, governor, or president as in the rest of the country. But this is partly obviated by the personal acquaintance of the inhabitants with the

members of the board. 2. The concurrence of a number of separately elected authorities, so that there is no guarantee for uniformity or subordination in the administration. The tendency, however, is more and more to place the appointment of subordinates in the hands of the selectmen, of course on their responsibility and without confirmation by anybody. 3. The difficulty of holding a town meeting where the number of inhabitants is considerable, which is the reason, or at all events the pretext, why the growth to twelve thousand inhabitants has involved the creation in Massachusetts of thirty-three cities with more than two-thirds of the inhabitants of the State. 4. And most important of all, the financial system, which in kind if not in degree, like all those above it, has no unity and no effective control. Expenditure is made without due regard to revenue, and revenue forced up to meet expenditure. The taxing authorities are separate from the spending. Any inhabitant can propose an expenditure, and if the meeting adopts it there is nobody who has the power to protect the general interest against a sudden impulse.

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Yet notwithstanding these defects, it may be safely said that the town government is the best in the country, and that for precisely the reason which forms the keynote of this book, the effective separation of the executive and legislative power, the prevention of the absorption of executive power by the legislative body, and the confining of the latter strictly to its proper functions of enforcing responsibility upon the executive and of granting or withholding money.

It is interesting to compare the next step in the scale of government, that of the county. Mr. Bryce has pointed out how the circumstances in the Southern States led to no town government, but to that of the county.

Population was thinly scattered; estates were large; the soil was fertile and soon enriched its owner. Thus a semi-feudal society grew up, in which authority naturally fell to the landowners, each of whom was the centre of a group of free dependants as well as the master of an increasing crowd of slaves. There were, therefore, comparatively few urban communities, and the life of the colony took a rural type. The houses of the planters lay miles from one another, and when local divisions had to be created these were made large enough to include a considerable area of territory and number of land-owning gentlemen. They were, therefore, rural divisions, counties framed on the model of English counties. Smaller circumscriptions there were, such as hundreds and parishes, but the hundreds died out, the parish ultimately became a purely ecclesiastical division, and the parish vestry was restricted to ecclesiastical functions, while the county remained the practically important unit of local administration, the unit to which the various functions of government were aggregated, and which, itself controlling minor authorities, was controlled by the State government alone. The affairs of the county were usually managed by a board of elective commissioners, and not, like those of the New England towns, by a primary assembly, and in an aristocratic society the leading planters had, of course, a predominating influence. Hence this form of local government was not only less democratic, but less stimulating and educative than that which prevailed in the New England States. Nor was the Virginian

county, though so much larger than the New England town, ever as important an organism over against the State. It may almost be said, that while a New England State is a combination of towns, a Southern State is from the first an administrative as well as political whole, whose subdivisions, the counties, had never any truly independent life, but were and are mere subdivisions for the convenient despatch of judicial and financial business.1

He then goes on to show how in the Middle and Western States a combination of the two systems grew up. For the present purpose, however, it will be sufficient to examine the organization of county government in Massachusetts. There is an annual county convention, to which delegates are chosen in the ward-and primary meetings of the cities and towns. Each county chooses one commissioner to serve for three years, making three in all, one retiring each year. Each county also chooses

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each year two special commissioners who can be called in, in case for any reason any of the regulars is unable to serve. The county commissioners have charge of roads (so far as they have not been taken out of their hands by the Highway Commission), bridges, jails, and courthouses. The extent of their jurisdiction, however, is less important than its kind. It is perfectly irresponsible executive power in the hands of three men, wanting even the responsibility which accrues to unlimited despotism in the hands of one. Being elected by the people, they cannot be called to account by any other authority, the Supreme Court of the State having recently decided that they are not even subject to impeachment. As they never appear before any tribunal, like the town meeting or the legislature, the people really know nothing at all about them or their doings, and their election is a matter of pure party nomination. It is not surprising therefore that scandals in that department are more rife than anywhere else in the State, though the recent development of executive commissions promises a future crop equal in kind and far higher in degree. Stories are told of looseness of appropriations for county expenditure passed through the legislature, and of corresponding looseness of accounts, of which one example may suffice. The following data are taken from the report of a joint committee of six members of the house and three of the senate, in June, 1896.

In the year 1892 an Act was passed authorizing the commissioners of Norfolk County to

enlarge the Court-House in Dedham in said county, and for that purpose to borrow on the credit of the county or to raise by taxation a sum not exceeding $75,000.

In 1894 another Act authorized the commissioners

to borrow or raise by taxation a sum not exceeding $125,000, for completion of the Dedham Court-House, in addition to the previous $75,000.

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