This provision was intended to prevent the encumbering of the property of any citizen for public purposes to a greater extent than 7 per cent. In its workings it has been an absolute failure. In every city of the State, except Philadelphia, the city is part of the county government. The county has power to borrow to the extent of 7 per cent so has the city: so has the general school district : so has the ward school district-making 28 per cent in all, which can be lawfully imposed, and has been authorized by the Act of 1874. But there is still another cause of failure to which Philadelphia is more peculiarly liable. In order to evade the provision of the Constitution limiting the power to contract debts to 7 per cent, the assessed value of property in nearly every city of the State was largely increased-in some instances, incredible as it may seem, to the extent of 1000 per cent. It is therefore clear that no sufficient protection against an undue increase of municipal debt can be found in constitutional and legislative provisions of this kind.”—Philadelphia, a History of Municipal Development (1887),

p. 276.

Nevertheless, such restrictions are now often found embodied in State constitutions, and have, so far as I could ascertain, generally diminished the evil they are aimed at.1

The results of these various experiments, and of others which I have not space to enumerate, are now being watched with eager curiosity by the municipal reformers of the United States. The question of city government is that which chiefly occupies practical publicists, and which newspapers and magazines incessantly discuss, because it is admittedly the weak point of the country. That adaptability of the institutions to the people and their conditions, which judicious strangers admire in the United States, and that consequent satisfaction of the people with their institutions, which contrasts so agreeably with the discontent of European nations, is wholly absent as regards municipal administration. Wherever there is

1 See note in Appendix at the end of this volume.

a large city there are loud complaints, and Americans who deem themselves in other respects a model for the Old World are in this respect anxious to study Old World models, those particularly which the cities of Great Britain present. The best proof of dissatisfaction is to be found in the frequent changes of system and method. What Dante said of his own city may be said of the cities of America: they are like the sick man who cannot find rest upon his bed, but seeks to ease his pain by turning from side to side. Yet no one who studies the municipal history of the last decades will doubt that things are better than they were twenty years ago. The newer frames of government are an improvement upon the older. Rogues are less audacious. Good citizens are more active. Party spirit is less and less permitted to dominate and pervert municipal politics.

CHAPTER LII

AN AMERICAN VIEW OF MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT IN

THE UNITED STATES

1

By the Hon. SETH Low, formerly Mayor of the City of Brooklyn

2

A CITY in the United States is quite a different thing from a city in its technical sense, as the word is used in England. In England a city is usually taken to be a place which is or has been the seat of a bishop. The head of a city government in England is a mayor, but many boroughs which are not cities are also governed by a mayor. In the United States a city is a place which has received a charter as a city from the legislature of its State. In America there is nothing whatever corresponding to the English borough. Whenever in the United States one enters a place that is presided over by a mayor, he may understand, without further inquiry, that he is in a city.

Any European student of politics who wishes to understand the problem of government in the United States, whether of city government or any other form of it, must first of all transfer himself, if he can, to a point of view precisely the opposite of that which is natural to

1 This chapter is copyright, by Seth Low, 1888.

2 In Scotland, where there have been, since the Revolution, no bishops, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen are described as cities. Westminster

is a city, but has never had a bishop.

him. This is scarcely, if at all, less true of the English than of the continental student. In England as upon the continent, from time immemorial, government has descended from the top down. Until recently, society in Europe has accepted the idea, almost without protest, that there must be governing classes, and that the great majority of men must be governed. In the United States that idea does not obtain, and, what is of scarcely less importance, it never has obtained. No distinction is recognized between governing and governed classes, and the problem of government is conceived to be this, that the whole of society should learn and apply to itself the art of government. Bearing this in mind, it becomes apparent that the immense tide of immigration into the United States is a continually disturbing factor. The immigrants come from many countries, a very large pro-. portion of them being of the classes which, in their old homes from time out of mind, have been governed. Arriving in America, they shortly become citizens in a society which undertakes to govern itself. However well-disposed they may be as a rule, they have not had experience in self-government, nor do they always share the ideas which have expressed themselves in the Constitution of the United States. This foreign element settles largely in the cities of the country. It is estimated that the population of New York City contains eighty per cent of people who either are foreign-born or who are the children of foreign-born parents. Consequently, in a city like New York, the problem of learning the art of government is handed over to a population that begins in point of experience very low down. In many of the cities of the United States, indeed in almost all of them, the population not only is thus largely untrained in the art of self-government, but it is not even

homogeneous. So that an American city is confronted not only with the necessity of instructing large and rapidly-growing bodies of people in the art of government, but it is compelled at the same time to assimilate strangely different component parts into an American community. It will be apparent to the student that either one of these functions by itself would be difficult enough. When both are found side by side the problem is increasingly difficult as to each. Together they represent a problem such as confronts no city in the United Kingdom, or in Europe.

The American city has had problems to deal with also of a material character, quite different from those which have confronted the cities of the Old World. With the exception of Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, and New York, there is no American city of great consequence whose roots go back into the distant past even of America. American cities as a rule have grown with a rapidity to which the Old World presents few parallels. London, in the extent of its growth, but not in the proportions of it, Berlin since 1870, and Rome in the last few years, are perhaps the only places in Europe which have been compelled to deal with this element of rapid growth in anything like a corresponding degree. All of these cities, London, Berlin, and Rome, are the seats of the national government, and receive from that source more or less help and guidance in their development. In all of them an immense nucleus of wealth existed before this great and rapid growth began. The problem in America has been to make a great city in a few years out of nothing. There has been no nucleus of wealth upon which to found the structure which every succeeding year has enlarged. Recourse has been had of neces sity, under these conditions, to the freest use of the