usher in the millennium; all of which are earnestly and intelligently and eloquently advocated, none of which I am here to criticise; but, whatever it may be, the beauties visible to the eye of faith in the more or less distant day of its practical acceptance, in no wise help us to deal with the scoundrel who yonder winks and leers at us while he pockets the salary we pay. He must be handled now, not in a future Golden Age, and if we wait until he and his kind have voluntarily made their own prosperity and continued existence impossible, we shall wait long and very much to his and their satisfaction. I was much impressed by a sermon I once heard on the gospel story of the paralytic to whom was said: "Arise, take up thy bed and go into thy house." The clergyman who preached it suggested that the invalid might most reasonably have replied: "Sir, I have not walked for years, for this did I come to Thee; heal me first and most gladly will I then obey Thy words." Such an answer would have been reasonable; and had he made it, the sick man had not been healed. So if we wait for existing evils to be cured by Providence or to cure themselves, wait for some great change to come some how and at some time, we know not how or when; and, while it is coming, content ourselves with telling what we will do when it comes or would do were it here; it will simply not come at all, and we shall lie as we lay before, prostrate and helpless. But if, letting Utopia take care of itself, dealing with a present duty, which, of a surety, needs and deserves our full strength, we obey the voice of honor and conscience within us and do what we know ought to be done now and here, that which seemed impossible may well come to pass, indeed it will surely come to pass if we but try and try without ceasing to bring it about. As we strive to gain a better government, we shall come to deserve one and as and when we deserve this we shall have this. Freedom is not the birthright of slumberers. Those serve truth best who to themselves are true Such men, and such only, will remain truly freemen. SOME ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF THE NEW MUNICIPAL PROGRAM. JOHN A. BUTLER, President, Municipal Association of Milwaukee. There is really little left to do in the exposition of the New Municipal Program, but there is a great difference between scientifically setting forth the general character of a piece of complicated mechanism with which you are familiar not only in its parts, but as a whole in which the distinct parts disappear; and patiently familiarizing the public with its processes as a whole, and with the exact degree in which the subordinate parts are subordinate, and the whole dependent for its original force and operation upon the presence of every essential part. It is much the same with what may be regarded as a new bit of political machinery as it is with a great railway engine. Its apparently dangerous features are first to strike the eye. The observer must learn to follow the less obvious lines of control, and the measure of subordination, before he can understand the safety of the whole, and of every part; and he does not realize until thoroughly informed that it is safe not only because its parts are controlled at every point, but because no essential part is absent, and the whole is perfectly adjusted to the manipulation of the engineer who, in the case of political machinery, is represented in this country by the people. I do not imagine that any considerable number of men regard the new Municipal Program, which we believe to be an important advance in the development of municipal machinery, as a dangerous instrument. Otherwise it would not have received the designation of the Model Charter, so frequently applied to it outside of the National Municipal League. But it is regarded as dangerous in some quarters and by a limited number of people whose condemnation is its best eulogy, and the most certain indication of its special merits. It is in the vast gossip shop of ring politics that its dangerous points are adroitly and insistently pointed out, and its essential features infallibly indicated to those who are sufficiently astute. A carefully aroused distrust of a strong mayor with no reference to the character and responsibility inevitably belonging to the mayor under the new Program, and with no recognition of the new responsibility and the necessity for active participation in public business which the exclusive legislative home rule of the Program irresistibly imposes upon the people: A seeming dread of the power reposed in the hands of the people by the same instrument: Anxiety lest there may be no electric street cars in our growing interior cities under a franchise limit of twenty-one years, though that limit exists in many localities with no serious results, as far as I can learn: These are some of the fragmentary and superficial arguments with which the Program is assailed by interested parties, and by which well meaning legislators and respectable politicians are sometimes deterred from endorsing it, and uncertain citizens rendered timid in its advocacy. It is therefore still necessary to explain its merits for the benefit of those who are not yet instructed or convinced, in the hope of securing at least an experimental application of its principles. Let us examine some of the criticisms to which it has been exposed, and then present some of its leading provisions in such a manner as to indicate their natural interdependence, and their beneficent possibilities as a related whole. It has been said in some quarters that the new Program is not a historic growth, and that a municipal charter should, so to speak, be a product of the soil, gradually evolved. The facts are these: The gentlemen who drafted the new charter occupied a position similar to that of the men who drafted the national constitution. The former had all English constitutional history back of them. They all differed in opinion, and out of long discussion there finally developed a simple formulation of the basal principles of English liberty in the Old and New worlds, upon which they could agree. They were not creating so much as they were selecting what had been evolved in the course of centuries; and by rigidly excluding the extraneous, the crystallizing process finally led to a perfect product, the result of true historic growth. It is precisely the same with the new Municipal Program. After years of careful study of the condition of American and European cities, it is the result of a final compromise, not upon a basis of theoretical views, but of actual and successful practice; and the component parts of the Program, are what was left after a careful scrutiny of the crude and original formulations of actual municipal experience and methods. The mayor system was found in its most successful operation in Brooklyn. The idea that a city may frame its own charter comes from Missouri. The system of municipal accounting from Wyoming. The election of the council in thirds from various American and European cities. The very democratic principle of legislative Municipal home rule from the very origin of democratic government, the early days of American municipal history, and the present practice of many European cities; while nomination by petition with entire freedom from Bosses and Rings, and the conventions which make their work possible, comes from the cities of England. The only feature of the Program which may not have been derived from practice is, so far as I know, the unassailable one of preventing special legislation by clearly defining it in the Constitution, which may have been suggested by the full grant of local powers to French cities. The charter is therefore emphatically not an innovation, but the result of historic growth; the last process of simplification like the finished engine, in which every part is conducive to the desired result, and every part is safe because it is properly and absolutely subordinated in the operation of the whole, and the whole is subordinated exclusively to the will and sense of responsibility of the engineer. The idea of exclusive legislative power in local affairs is fundamental and sound in principle, for each municipal community is, in the very nature of things, entitled to a local will and its local enforcement, within proper and definite limits; that is in matters which concern it alone. The new Program and the accompanying constitutional amendment aim therefore, first, to secure actual legislative home rule for American cities, so that the local will may be formulated independently of the state by the city's legislature; and second, to secure the enforcement of that will by a sufficiently firm and adequately responsible executive. That portion of the charter was framed on the sound assumption that the people should and can govern, that bad city government arises from the fact that, under existing conditions, they do not govern, but only appear to do so; and that the radical cure for the socalled apathy to which bad city government is so often attributed, is not only to give them a chance to have a clearly defined will and enforce it locally, but to make them solely responsible for its enforcement, and for the entire conduct of local government. That, of course, is not possible where cities are governed on a system of so-called enumerated powers, i. e., where a limited number of functions are delegated to the city by the state, with a large reservation of state legislative control. It is also not possible under a general charter in which cities are classified and opportunities for special legislation still remain. In such cases, the real responsibility rests with the state legislature, and the city is like a ward in chancery, irresponsible and powerless; and strange as it may appear that is the general condition of American cities. In the early history of the country it was natural that a vigorous prejudice should exist against a strong executive, on general principles, and it is from confused ideas associated with that prejudice that our municipal troubles have come in large part. At an early day free government was not guaranteed beyond peradventure in popular opinion, and in a sort of windmill fighting mood the people of our cities surrendered to their supposed ally, the state legislature, their real and historic liberties, the initial power of independent self-government, in exchange for the empty privilege of electing their own local executive officials; thus as was thought taking possible tyranny by the throat. In doing that they surrendered the very essence of democratic institutions, and the process has gone steadily forward until it has produced an enervating and vicious legislative state centralization, which has withered and destroyed energetic civic pride and independence, and placed our necks under the heel of those real monarchs, the ward heeler and the party boss. Almost with a single stroke of the pen, the committee of the |