them for money, or vote at the beck of some one who has control over them, or whom for private reasons they desire to propitiate; and the result invariably is, as pointed out by the same writer, "that popular election thus practiced, instead of a security against misgovernment, is but an additional wheel in its machinery." The defect of our system is that in municipalities the people have never been permitted actually to realize the dignity and responsibility of self-government. They have practically been denied the right to that experience which brings with it the only political education that renders a people capable of self-government. This is peculiarly harmful in the case of the larger cities, the very greatness of which has a tendency to eclipse the sense of private and personal responsibility on the part of their citizens, who, being lost in the crowd, feel themselves to be the ciphers rather than the units which go to make up the grand total of the population.

Local liberties are the only ones which most men fully realize the value of, the ones which all men most naturally and most gladly exercise, and these are just the ones which are refused to our city dwellers, who need them most because their government is most difficult. The result is that the history of municipal government with us, as with all peoples who are deprived of these liberties, is only the long story of an alternation of convulsions and failures; for the right of the Legislature to change our charters, to restrict, enlarge, or redistribute the powers conferred on our local representatives, is nothing less than a right to work revolutions at will, without even so much as consulting the cities themselves. Good government, consequently, if we ever have it, is purely accidental, and from bad government we have no escape except in appeal ing to the State to exercise its right of making revolutions for us, thus calling upon the very power whose continued interference has done most to produce the prevalent evils. At one time or another every possible plan, one only excepted, has been resorted to for the government of municipalities in this State, and that one is the honest democratic - republican plan which permits cities really to rule themselves. But this happens to be the people's plan, and it is not regarded with favor by the politicians, who have become a professional caste whose interests are

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1

And now it may be asked how the evil is to be corrected. I answer, by according constitutional protection to local gov ernments; by providing in the State con+ stitution for the enactment of a general code for the government of all cities, which code shall never be changed or amended except in such manner as to affect all cities alike. Municipalities will then cease to be the sport of the lobby," and the fruits of popular activity in striving to secure good government can not be stolen by the politicians through the in tervention of the central authority, porta

Such is to-day the law in several States, notably Illinois and Ohio... In the former of these the constitution provides that "the General Assembly shall not pass local or special laws in any of the fol lowing enumerated cases, that is to say. for.... incorporating cities, towns, or villages, or changing or amending the char ter of any town, city, or village." In com pliance with its terms the Legislature in 1875 passed a general "act to provide for the incorporation of cities and villages." Cities which had charters at the time of its passage were permitted to change them for the general charter upon a vote of their citizens. In like manner incorporated towns might adopt the city charter upon complying with the prescribed form, and new or theretofore unchartered villages or towns were in the same way allowed to hold their political destinies in their own hands. This general law also contains alternative provisions, between which the corporators shall have the right of electing; for example, whenever the act is submitted to the electors for adoption, there is at the same time submitted for adoption or rejection

the question of minority representation in the legislative branch of the city government, the ballots being "For minority representation in the City Council," and "Against minority representation in the City Council"; and provision is made for the manner of electing these officers as one or the other plan is adopted. This general charter is a work of statesmanship as compared with the charters of cities in such States as New York and New Jersey. It creates a general and intelligible system, harmonious in its parts, and under which the relations between the central and the local governing bodies are so well and clearly defined that there is but little room for the manifold evils of which we have to complain.

The Ohio system is very similar to that of Illinois. The Thirteenth Article of the State Constitution of 1851 provides that the General Assembly may not by special act create a corporation, or confer additional powers on one already existing, and the courts held that in the application of this article there was meant to be no distinction between private and municipal corporations. The result was the enactment in 1852 of a general law for the government of cities, "which did not annihilate and re-create existing municipal corporations of the State, but reorganized and continued them, leaving their corporate identity unaffected." In 1869 an elaborate municipal code was enacted, by which all municipal corporations then existing or since created are governed. These are divided into cities of the first and cities of the second class, incorporated villages, and villages for special purposes. Cities of the second class may not be advanced to cities of the first class until they have a population of 20,000, and incorporated villages may not become cities of the second class until they have a population of 5000. Villages are organized upon petition of their resident voters, and, once in corporated, they are advanced to cities of the second class, and these latter to cities of the first class, upon petition of a given number of resident freeholders, and provided they have the requisite population to entitle them to advancement, and then only after the question has been submitted to election. The administrative organization of the different ranks or grades of municipal corporations necessarily varies, but most of the provisions of the act refer to all alike. The result is a coherent and

systematic body of law, which secures the highest degree of local self-government compatible with the just requirements of a central authority.

In like manner there is now a system of incorporation by general law in England, where it was found to be the best way of bringing some degree of order out of chaos. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 took as its model the bestadministered municipal corporations, and provided a uniform system for all boroughs to which it applied. It annulled all charters inconsistent with its provisions, and framed a model constitution, which with slight modifications should apply to all towns then or thereafter to be brought under the act." This "great charter of English municipal liberty," as it has been called, has many times been amended by general laws, and the whole has now been reduced to a single act, which Mr. Chalmers speaks of as “probably the best drafted act on the statute-book," and which is known as the "Municipal Corporations Act of 1882." It is a complete municipal code for all boroughs to which it applies; and while in itself it may afford us but little practical aid in the improvement of our own law, the manner in which it has sufficed to simplify and render certain the principles of local government is of the utmost value as suggesting the only real cure for the ills of our system.

The first step in the proper direction has already been taken in this State, but only after long delay and much opposition. In 1881 a resolution was offered in the Assembly at Albany proposing an amendment to Section 9, Article VIII., of the Constitution, guaranteeing to cities the right of municipal self-government, republican in form, and restricting the power of the Legislature to the enactment of general laws in reference thereto. It prescribes that it shall be the duty of the Legislature to provide for the organization of cities and incorporated villages, and to restrict their power of taxation, etc., by the passage of general laws only, applicable alike to all incorporated cities, and that the Legislature shall not pass any special or local bill affecting the municipal government of a city. It also provides that "no city shall increase its permanent debt, or raise the rate of taxation above that prevailing at the time of the adoption of the amendment, or undertake new public works, or direct public

T must have been in the mellow haze

the East River Bridge to sketch the ruins

the Dutch forefathers dropped anchor in the pleasant harbour, now mostly meadow, at the mouth of the Pocantico, at Tarrytown, and named it Die Släperig Hafen The Sleepy Haven. Nor was this name merely the expression of their subjectivity; for when the English followed up the swift-running stream between two hills,

"In the afternoon they came into a land In which it seemeth always afternoon," and named it Sleepy Hollow-a nanie which now designates the whole valley of the Pocantico. And there is many another such nook amid the hills whose water-sheds feed and fill the most beautiful of rivers.

A century later than the Dutch explorers came the Palatine refugees, who, passing by the already occupied terri tory, landed nearest the "mountains which lie from the river's side," known even then as the mountains of the Kaaterskill. Their slopes were gorgeous with such hues as Europeans never saw. On the hills and in the glens ten thousand bushes burned as with fire, yet were not consumed. The maple and the sumac and the Virginia creeper and the expanses of golden-rod and purple asters, seemed remnants of paradise untouched by sin,

"A land of pleasing drowsy-head it was," where one fain might sleep and dream and dream and sleep for ever.

With both these localities Washington Irving was familiar. They furnished their part of the material for the construction of the legend of Sleepy Hollow and the legend of Rip Van Winkle.

It is not strange that cursory readers combine the two, and insist that the same locality is the scene of both. Those who have seen the Catskill ravine outnumber those who have seen the valley of the Pocantico a thousandfold; and few of these thousands will ever doubt but that the only true and original Sleepy Hollow is that in which Rip Van Winkle slept his wondrous sleep so long ago. Not improhably, in the ages to come, when the famed traveller from New Zealand shall take his stand upon the broken tower of VOL. LXVII-No. 100.-39.

be the only Sleepy Hollow of which he shall hear. Indeed, it is just as easy to fall asleep in the wooded gorge of the mountain as amid the hills and dales of the valley. Both legends show how the writer turned all that he touched to gold, and stimulate desire to discover the secret and watch the working of his more than Midas power; and this desire is partly gratified in the endeavour to trace the genesis of the Rip Van Winkle legend.

The charm of this legend is largely due to heridity and environment. The author was descended from the Erwyns of Orkney, and his ancestors must have received from the peculiar life and romantic scenery of the Isles impressions which duly became congenital characteristics. Join to this the fact that his mother was an English woman, and we have a sufficient biological basis for the psychical and cosmical forces which wrought in him.

Washington Irving was born in New York a hundred years ago. In childhood his holiday afternoons were spent in rambles about the surrounding country. He became familiar with every spot famous in history or fable, where a murder or a robbery had been committed, or a ghost encountered. At twelve he read and enjoyed Hoole's translation of Orlando Furioso, and showed himself a predestined littérateur. At fifteen he wandered through Sleepy Hollow with dog and gun. At seventeen he made his first voyage up the Hudson. Writing of it long after, he said; "The Kaaterskill Mountains had the most witching effect on my boyish imagination. As we slowly floated along I lay on deck and watched them, through a long summer day, undergoing a thousand mutations under the magical effects of atmosphere."

Often after this he wandered along the banks of the river he loved, and into the mountains which feed it with their streams, drinking in the beauties of the scenery, and adding to his stock of knowledge by noting the habits and customs of the villagers, and conversing with their sages and great men. quick perception took in the salient

His

points of people as well as the charms of landscape. If he had not become a great author, he would have been a great artist. He saw everything with a painter's eye, and depicted it with the fidelity of a historian and the genius of a poet.

Irving's facts are often of that most numerous class illogically designated false facts, but his scenes are true to nature, and his characters are drawn to the life. Perhaps the most artistic and life-like of all his characters is that of Diedrich Knickerbocker, ostensible author of the legend of Rip Van Winkle. His family name is Dutch, and his Christian name is still a common family name among the descendants of the Germans from the Palatinate. He himself combines the idiosyncrasies of both. In a note appended to the legend Mr. Knickerbocker informs us that he himself has talked with Rip Van Winkle, and that " the story, therefore, is beyond the possibility of doubt." The editor, as if to forestall cruel criticism, introduces this note by saying that without it one would suspect that the tale had been "suggested by a little German superstition about the Emperor Friedrich der Rothbart and the Kypphauser Mountain." The clew thus given seems to have led explorers into a Serbonian bog.

The Kypphauser Mountain is in the Harzwald, in Thuringia, on the headwaters of the Weser. The first account of an Emperor Frederick dwelling in this mountain we find in a chronicle of the year 1426. Nearly a century later he is identified with the successful warrior and popular ruler who lost his life in the third Crusade. A little book printed in 1519 tells the story expressly of "Kaiser Friedrich den Erst seines Namens, mit ainen langen rotten Bart, den die Walhen nenten Barbarossa," that is, the Emperor Frederick, the first of his name, with a long red beard, whom the Italians called Barbarossa."

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The story lived on in men's mouths and grew during that and the succeeding centuries, until it took its present form in Otmar's Volkssagen, published at Bremen in the year 1800.

The Emperor sits on an ivory throne in his subterranean castle at a table consisting of a huge block of marble, through which, as he bows his slumber

ing head, his long red beard has already grown down to the floor, and begun to wrap itself about the stone. At the end of each succeeding century he rouses himself sufficiently to ask, "Do the ravens still fly on the mountain?" and receiving an affirmative answer, instantly relapses into profound sleep. But the time will come when he will awake, to renew on a grander scale than ever before his battles for his country. When his red beard shall have wrapped itself three times round the stone, when the ravens fly no longer on the mountain-top, when his people need him most to deliver them from pagan or from Paynim foes, then will he come forth, and having accomplished his mission, will hang his shield on a withered bough, that shall at once begin to grow green again with life.

The story told of Frederick is told in all its essentials of many another hero before and since, and indeed of several other German emperors, one of the most recent being Joseph II., who died in 1790, but was believed by his subjects in Bohemia to be secreted by papal enemies in an underground prison in Rome. So general and persistent was this belief that so late as the year 1826 a swindler, in order to obtain money from the people, thought it worth while to announce himself as the Emperor Joseph returning to claim his crown. According to the National Zeitung of January 29, 1874, it was believed even then in Munich that King Maximilian II. was not dead, but had been spirited away to an island, where he was seen so late as the year 1870 by a prisoner of war, and since that also by a soldier, whose name unfortunately is not given. There are wellknown traditions that Charles V. bides his time in a mountain near Salzburg, and Charlemagne, with his long white beard, in the Oldenberg in Hess. The three founders of the Swiss Confederacy sleep in a cave at Rutli, near the Lake of the Four Cantons. Near Mehnen, on the Weser, sleeps Wedekind; and in the mountain castle of Geroldseck, Ariobistus and Siegfried, heroes of the "NibelungenLied." In his vaulted chamber near Kronburg sits Ogier the Dane, and once in seven years stamps the floor with his mace, impatient to go forth again to avenge his country's wrongs. So Arthur in England, Svatopluk in Slavonia, Krajelvić Marko in Servia, and a hundred