THE CITY IN THE UNITED STATES-THE PROPER

SCOPE OF ITS ACTIVITIES

ALBERT SHAW

If I were asked to characterize in a single sentence the broad distinction between the history of the past thirty years of municipal government in Europe, on the one hand, and America, on the other, I should say that in the United States we have been making and unmaking municipal charters, and meanwhile administering them as badly as possible, while in Europe they have been bending their energies to the work of administering progressively and well such charters as their cities found provided for them in the general statutes. In other words, we have been making, marring, unmaking and repairing municipal mechanisms, while the people of European cities have been using their municipal machines to accomplish results in the way of an improved life for their people. I do not mean to say that the conditions of life are more advantageous for the average man to-day in European towns than in our own. On the other hand, I am entirely prepared to assert that almost all the natural advantages belonged to us, and that if our municipal governments had been anything like as relatively efficient as those of the European towns the results achieved by us would have been vastly ahead of those that the best towns in England, Scotland, and Germany have been able to secure.

The main outline of the English Municipal Corporations act has now sufficed for sixty-three years. It applies uniformly through

out the country, except in London. The French Municipal act, although materially revised some fifteen years ago, represents a fairly stable system which has its roots buried deep in the sweeping administrative reforms of a hundred years ago. The Prussian system, revised, of course, very considerably in more recent times, remains, nevertheless, recognizable in the main as belonging to Stein's period of administrative reform some ninety years ago. The Italian and other European systems are more recent, to be sure; but they are built upon permanent and stable lines, and their evolution has been distinctly in the direction of scientific unity and symmetry. Paris and Vienna, like London, came under an exceptional régime by reason, on the one hand, of their exceptional size and cosmopolitan importance, and on the other hand by reason of their peculiar relationship to national life and national government. Otherwise the municipal systems are, as respects their framework, uniform throughout the countries concerned.

The tendency in all those countries, however, has been, while prescribing the general form of municipal government and making that form familiar, identical, and permanent, to give each individual municipality in matters actually concerning the life of that community alone, a very wide range of liberty in determining for itself what from time to time should be the diminished or expanded scope of its functions. Thus the English cities have been spared the task of raising from time to time the question of the distribution of power, for example, as between the Mayor and the Council. The charter of 1835 settled that question once for all. Nor has it been for them to raise the issue whether or not

they would have separate municipal elections. That question was settled for them all, in the only right way, at the very outset.

Of course, a municipal corporation should have a separate election; and, of course, the choosing of its officers should not be mixed up with the election of members of Congress or Presidential electors. Nor have the English cities ever been permitted to bother themselves with discussions of the question whether or not a municipal Council should sit as one body or should be divided into two chambers, to correspond to the House of Commons and the House of Lords. At the very outset in England, as in all other European countries, they have been wise enough to settle that question by general legislation for all municipalities. And so with many other questions involving the mere structure or framework of the municipal government.

There is no advantage in leaving it to a town to decide for itself whether it will repose the appointing power in the Mayor or in the City Council, or apportion it, giving some of it to the City Council and a good deal of it to a series of administrative boards. When such questions are worked out separately for each community, whether or not the alterations are-as, of course, they usually are nominally ratified by the Legislature in a special act, such changes are almost never brought about for really broad and conclusive reasons of public policy. We have all witnessed very many such changes in the United States, and almost without an exception all the changes have been made in order that a certain set of individuals, holding temporarily an advantageous position, might profit at the expense of some other set of individuals and at the expense of the community at large. The municipal charter changes of the past thirty years in the United States, as embodied for the most part in special acts of Legislatures, would fill a very large library. Yet the science of administrative law has derived very little benefit from the work that went

1

into the framing of these thousands upon thousands of statutes. It is not intended to include in this disparagement, however, the work of a considerable number of special charter commissions which have for good reasons been appointed to work out an improved scheme of administration for their respective towns. Much of this work has been of an admirable character; but the trouble has been that the wise views embodied in the reports of such commissions have-even if at first adopted-been subject to radical and arbitrary change, often at the very next session of the Legislature, for the benefit of some clique, or party, or conspiracy of selfseeking politicians or grasping private interests. The main outlines of a municipal system should be uniform throughout all the towns of a State, and there is no particular reason why a fairly workable American system might not tend, at least approximately, toward something like uniformity throughout the whole country. This point of view has found expression in the draft of a municipal charter which has been submitted as a part of the Municipal Program.

When, however, it comes to the question what these more or less uniformly organized municipal corporations shall do from month to month and year to year-what services they shall render to the men, women, and children who are the constituents or elements of the municipal corporation-nobody can decide so well as the individual municipality how far it will carry its activities and in what variety of ways in detail it shall make itself serviceable to its citizens. The theory of the municipal corporation in Europe, to speak in general terms rather than with legal exactitude, has been developed somewhat as follows: The conditions of industry, traffic, and social intercourse have from the earliest times resulted in those aggregations of population that

we call towns. Modern conditions have greatly accelerated the tendency to flock together in densely inhabited communities. The progress of civilization has rendered many common services either practically necessary or else highly desirable, while on the other hand the progress of science and of wealth has shown the way to the common supply of such needs or desires. The State itself, on its own part, is affected in its life and functions by the development of civilization and the progress of science.

The police power, for instance, is always inherent in the State. Changing social conditions and the advance of civilization have rendered more imperative and more exacting the duties of the State in the direction of the maintenance of order and the general exercise of functions growing out of the police power. It is the business of the State to provide a minimum uniform standard of requirements for the general enforcement of State laws and the general exercise of the State's police authority. As a matter of convenience, however, it has been found well in Europe to make the municipal corporation the agent of the State for the exercise of at least certain parts of the State's police authority within the limits of the municipality, while it has been recognized as the proper function of the municipality to exercise still further a more particular police jurisdiction on its own behalf, in order to provide more completely for the safety and wellbeing of the population under the conditions peculiar to the town as distinguished from country districts, or peculiar to the particular town as distinguished from some other municipality.

In like manner the municipality may act as the agent or local representative of the State in the administration of the poor-laws, a portion of the penal laws, and a portion of the educational system of the Commonwealth, while in its municipal capacity and on