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to take entire charge of the business. Yet in any case the county must meet the expenses. The trustees are the health officers of the township. They may require persons to be vaccinated; they may require the removal of filth injurious to health; they may adopt bye-laws for preserving the health of the community and enforce them by fine and imprisonment."1

In most of these States the county overshadows the township. Taking Pennsylvania as an example, we find each county governed by a board of three commissioners, elected for three years, upon a minority vote system, the elector being allowed to vote for two candidates only. Besides these there are officers, also chosen by popular vote for three years, viz. a sheriff, coroner, prothonotary, registrar of wills, recorder of deeds, treasurer, surveyor, three auditors, clerk of the court, district attorney. Some of these officers are paid by fees, except in counties whose population exceeds 50,000, where all are paid by salary. A county with at least 40,000 inhabitants is a judicial district, and elects its judge for a term of ten years. No new county is to contain less than 400 square miles or 20,000 inhabitants. The county, besides its judicial business and the management of the prisons incident thereto, besides its duties as respects highways and bridges, has educational and usually also poor-law functions; and it levies its county tax and the State taxes through a collector for each township whom it and not the township appoints. It audits the accounts of townships, and has other rights of control over these minor communities exceeding those allowed by Michigan or Illinois. I must not omit to remark that where any local arca is not governed by a primary assembly of all its citizens, as in those States where there is no Town meeting, and in all States in respect to counties, a method is frequently provided for taking the judgment of the citizens of the local area, be it township or

1 A Government Text-Book for Iowa Schools, pp. 21-23.

2 See Constitution of Pennsylvania of 1873, Arts. xiv. xiii. and v.

The average population of a county in Pennsylvania was in 1880 64,000. There are sixty-seven.

* See "Local Government in Pennsylvania," in J. II. U. Studies, by E. R. L Gould, Baltimore, 1883.

As the primary meeting is in England dying out in the form of the parish vestry, so the plebiscitary method seems to be coming in to meet the now more democratic conditions of the country. It is recognized in the Free Library Acts, which provide for taking a poll of all the ratepayers within a given local area to determine whether or no a local rate shall be levied to provide a free public library. And see above (Chapter XXXIX.) as to the proposal to submit to popular vote the question of granting licences for the sale of intoxicating liquors.

county, by popular vote at the polls upon a specific question, usually the borrowing of money or the levying of a rate beyond the regular amount. This is an extension to local divisions of the so-called "plebiscitary" or referendum method, whose application to State legislation has been discussed in a preceding chapter. It seems to work well, for by providing an exceptional method of meeting exceptional cases, it enables the ordinary powers of executive officials, whether in township or county, to be kept within narrow limits.

Want of space has compelled me to omit from this sketch many details which might interest European students of local government, nor can I attempt to indicate the relations of the rural areas, townships and counties, to the incorporated villages and cities which lie within their compass further than by observing that cities, even the smaller ones, are usually separated from the townships, that is to say, the township government is superseded by the city government, while cities of all grades remain members of the counties, bear their share in county taxation, and join in county elections. Often, however, the constitution of a State contains special provisions to meet the case of a city so large as practically to overshadow or absorb the county, as Chicago does the county of Cook, and Cincinnati the county of Hamilton, and sometimes the city is made a county by itself. Of these villages and other minor municipalities there are various forms in different States. Ohio, for instance, divides her municipal corporations into (a) cities, of which there are two classes, the first class containing three grades, the second class four grades; (b) villages, also with two classes, the first of from 3000 to 5000 inhabitants, the second of from 200 to 3000; and (c) hamlets, incorporated places with less than 200 inhabitants.1 The principles which govern these organizations are generally the same; the details are infinite, and incapable of being summarized here. Of minor incorporated bodies therefore I say no more. But the larger cities furnish a wide and instructive field of inquiry; and to them three chapters must be devoted.

1 Ohio Voters' Manual, Appendix K. Ohio contains: Cities-1 first class, first grade, 1 first class, second grade, 1 first class, third grade, 2 second class, first grade, 1 second class, second grade, 9 second class, third grade, 23 second class, fourth grade; Villages-34 first class, 395 second class; Hamlets-32, besides 785 unincorporate places or towns mentioned in Secretary of State's Report for 1881.

CHAPTER XLIX

OBSERVATIONS ON LOCAL GOVERNMENT

Ir may serve to clear up a necessarily intricate description if I add here a few general remarks applicable to all, or nearly all, of the various systems of local government that prevail in the several States of the Union.

L. Following American authorities, I have treated the New England type or system as a distinct one, and referred the Northwestern States to the mixed type. But the European reader may perhaps figure the three systems most vividly to his mind if he will divide the Union into three zones-Northern, Middle, and Southern. In the northern, which. beginning at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri, stretches east to the Bay of Fundy, and includes the States of North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, and the six New England States, he will find a primary assembly, the Town or township meeting, in preponderant activity as the unit of local government. In the middle zone, stretching from California to New Jersey and New York, inclusive, along the fortieth parallel of latitude, he will find the township dividing with the county the interests and energy of the people. In some States of this zone the county is the more important organism and dwarfs the township; in some the township seems to be gaining on the county; but all are alike in this, that you cannot lose sight for a moment of either the smaller or the larger area, and that both areas are governed by elected executive officers. The third zone includes all the southern States; in which the county is the predominant organism, though here and there school districts and even townships are growing in significance.

II. Both county and township are, like nearly everything else in America, English institutions which have suffered a sea change. "The Southern county is an attenuated English shire with the

towns left out."1 The northern township is an English parish, a parish of the old seventeenth-century form, in which it was still in full working order as a civil no less than an ecclesiastical organization, holding common property, and often co-extensive with a town. The Town meeting is the English vestry, the selectmen are the churchwardens, or select vestrymen, called back by the conditions of colonial life into an activity fuller than they exerted in England even in the seventeenth century, and far fuller than they now retain.2 In England local self-government, except as regards the poor law, tended to decay in the smaller (i.e. parish or township) areas; the greater part of such administration as these latter needed, fell either to the justices in petty sessions or to officials appointed by the county or by the central government, until the legislation of the present century began to create new districts, especially poor law and sanitary districts, for local administration. In the larger English area, the county, true self. government died out with the ancient Shire Moot, and fell into the hands of persons (the justices assembled in Quarter Sessions) nominated by the Crown, on the recommendation of the lordlieutenant. It is only to-day that a system of elective county councils has been created by statute. In the American colonies the governor filled the place which the Crown held in England; but even in colonial days there was a tendency to substitute popular election for gubernatorial nomination; and county government, obeying the universal impulse, is now everywhere democratic in form; though in the South, while slavery and the plantation system lasted, it was practically aristocratic in its spirit and working.

3

1 Professor Macy, "Our Government," an admirable elementary sketch for school use of the structure and functions of the Federal and States governments.

2 Few things in English history are better worth studying, or have exercised a more pervading influence on the progress of events, than the practical dis. appearance from rural England of that Commune or Gemeinde which has remained so potent a factor in the economic and social as well as the political life of France and Italy, of Germany (including Austrian Germany) and of Switzerland. If Englishmen were half as active in the study of their own local institutions as Americans have begun to be in that of theirs, we should have had a copious literature upon this interesting subject.

3 However, the parish constables and way-wardens in some places continue to be elected by popular vote; and the manor courts and courts leet were semipopular institutions. Even now the parish vestry has some civil powers.

In counties the coroner continued to be elected by the freeholders, but in the session of 1888, a provision transferring the appointment to the newly-created. county councils was enacted by Parliament (51 & 52 Vict. ch. xli. § 5).

III. In England the control of the central government-that is, of Parliament is now maintained not only by statutes defining the duties and limiting the powers of the various local bodies, but also by the powers vested in sundry departments of the executive, the Local Government Board, Home Office, and Treasury, of disallowing certain acts of these bodies, and especially of supervising their expenditure and checking their borrowing. In American States the executive departments have no similar functions. The local authorities are restrained partly by the State legislature, whose statutes of course bind them, but still more effectively, because legislatures are not always to be trusted, by the State Constitutions. These instruments usually the more recent ones I think invariably-contain provisions limiting the amount which a county, township, village, school district, or other local area may borrow, and often also the amount of tax it may levy, by reference to the valuation of the property contained within its limits. Specimens of these provisions will be found in a note at the end of this volume. They have been found valuable in checking the growth of local indebtedness, which had become, even in rural districts, a serious danger. The total local debt was in 1880

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This sum bears a comparatively small proportion to the total debt of the several States and of the cities, which was then

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It is also a diminishing amount, having fallen eight per cent between 1870 and 1880, whereas city indebtedness was then still increasing.

1 See also Chapter XLIII. on "State Finance." These provisions are of course applied to cities also, which need them even more. They vary very much in their details, and in some cases a special popular vote is allowed to extend the limit.

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