what is the best model for one country may not be the best for another. London's method may be the best for London, and New York's radically different method the best for New York. But a deeper lesson is this, namely, that no municipal constitution and no municipal mechanism will necessarily insure good municipal government. Whether the essential powers of a municipality, as in England, are in an elective council, which elects its mayor and appoints its standing committees which oversee the various administrative departments, or, as in New York, where the substantial powers are in an autocratic mayor and in elective commissioners, and where the authority of the legislative branch is so curtailed as to leave that body almost a phantom, it depends almost wholly upon something else than forms of organization whether there will result good municipal rule. That indispensable something else is what may be called Civic Patriotism.

The subject naturally suggests thoughts and reflections of wide, deep, and permanent interest. By our early, uniform, and settled polity and all our sentiments, traditions, and usages, every distinct community in our land is self-governed in all its local concerns. This polity is based upon these solid and rational foundations: that the control of local affairs and the consequent responsibility should be vested in those who are immediately and directly interested and who will therefore reap the advantages of care and good management or suffer the consequences of neglect or mismanagement; that the possession and exercise of such powers by the citizen develop his capabilities for self-government, whereas if the power of local control is not possessed or exercised the interest of the citizen will cease and his capacity for self-government, both local and general, will become atrophied and inefficient. The cultivation and practice of civic patriotism are therefore among the chiefest duties of Ameri

priations aggregating that sum and con- Department of Education taining such items as:

Colleges

Board of City Record
Libraries

24,915,928

705,333

1,114,378

$306,202

846,325

1,243,480 Municipal Courts, civil and criminal
685,000 Support of dependent children
charitable institutions

1,227,150

in

3,767,810

7,423,281 County expenses for County Officers,

547,545

courts, etc.

4,664,839

Department of Water Supply, Gas and
Electricity

5,409,543

Department of Parks

2,657,863 Interest on city debt

17,072,880

Department of Public Charities

2,218.845 Interest on bonds to be issued in 1907 3,727,000

Hospitals

773,947 Redemption of city debt:

Department of Correction

1,000,059 Maturing obligations..

$8,898,795

Department of Health

1,847,820

Instalments payable in 1907 5,559,768

Tenement House Department

Police Department.

13,849,841

Board of Elections

1,015,850

Department of Street Cleaning

6,258,257

Fire Department

6,883,495

The totals of the budget for 1908 amounted to

Department of Taxes and Assessments.

400,000 $143,572,266 and for 1911 to $173,966,835.

can citizenship. By civic patriotism is meant the feeling and the taking of a deep, unselfish, earnest, ever-wakeful, active interest in the affairs of one's own city or local community, regarding it as having an autonomy, a distinct personality, a name and interests of its own, and, if one pleases, endowed with a sense of personal honor and with all laudable ambitions for the promotion of the welfare of its people. Where such civic virtues exist, the local community will neither suffer from the dry-rot of public indifference and neglect nor become tainted with "graft" or corruption. Its life will be healthful, and like the ocean will be kept pure by its own ceaseless flow and movement. All life-giving patriotism is local. Show a good municipal citizen and one will see a citizen who loves his State, and who loves his nation, and who will discharge all the duties of this triple relation. Good government in local affairs is the best assurance of good government in State and national affairs.

Happily our experience in this country demonstrates that the cardinal virtue of civic patriotism though subject to occasional lapses is, in the long run, and in every critical emergency, not wanting. Whenever and wherever in a city one sees public parks for the recreation and enjoyment of the people, public schools for the instruction of all the children, hospitals for the relief of sickness and suffering, homes of refuge for the aged and infirm, Sisters of Charity and others pursuing their saintly work "as ever in their Great Taskmaster's eye," churches maintained by voluntary contribution, and free libraries supported by the people, one may be assured that such a community is sound at the core. Happily our experience has demonstrated time and time again that municipal misrule or neglect cannot go beyond a certain limit, and that there is in every municipality in this land civic virtue enough whenever called into activity

to secure WELL-ORDERED AND HONEST MUNICIPAL RULE.

§ 30 (18). Corporation defined. A corporation is a legal institution, devised to confer upon the individuals of which it is composed powers, privileges, and immunities which they would not otherwise possess, the most important of which are continuous legal identity or unity, and perpetual or indefinite succession under the corporate name, notwithstanding successive changes, by death or otherwise, in the corporators or members. It conveys, perhaps, as intelligible an idea as can be given by a brief definition to say that a corporation is a legal person, perfectly distinct from the members which compose it, having a special name, and having such powers, and such only, as the law prescribes. The most accurate notions of complex subjects come not from definition, but description; and in the course of the present work we shall describe the class of corporations with which it deals, by their creation, constitution, faculties, powers, objects, duties, and liabilities. Some of the definitions and deductions in the earlier reports amuse by their quaintness, but are without much practical value. "As touching corporations," says Lord Coke, "the opinion of Manwood, chief baron, was this: that they were invisible, immortal, having no conscience or soul; and therefore, no subpoena lieth against them; they cannot speak, nor appear in person, but by attorney.'

Chief Justice Marshall's description of a corporation is remarkable for its general accuracy and felicitous expression: "A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in con

1 2 Bulst. 233; Willc. Corp. 15; ante, § 3.

templation of law. Being the mere creature of the law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it, either expressly or as incidental to its very existence. These are such as are supposed to be best calculated to effect the object for which it is created. Among the most important are immortality [in the legal sense that it may be made capable of indefinite duration], and, if the expression may be allowed, individuality, — properties by which a perpetual succession of many persons are considered as the same, and may act as a single, individual. They enable a corporation to manage its own affairs, and to hold property without the perplexing intricacy, the hazardous and endless necessity, of perpetual conveyances for the purpose of transmitting it from hand to hand. It is chiefly for the purpose of clothing bodies of men, in succession, with these qualities and capacities that corporations were invented and are in use. By these means a perpetual succession of individuals are capable of acting for the promotion of the partieular object like one immortal being." Thus, though the members change, the corporation itself remains in its legal personality and unity the same, all of its members, past and present, constituting in law but one person, in the same manner as the Thames or the Mississippi is still the same river, though the parts composing it are constantly changing. The above observations are, in general, applicable to all corporations, private as well as public and municipal.

§ 31 (19). Municipal Corporations defined. A municipal corporation, in its strict and proper sense, is the body politic and corporate constituted by the incorporation of the inhabitants of a city or town for the purposes of local government thereof. Municipal corporations as they exist in this country are bodies politic and corporate of the general character above described, established by law partly as an agency of the State to assist in the civil government of Glover, 8; Grant, 5; 7 Vin. Abr. 358, 363; ante, § 3.

1 Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 4 Wheat. 518. Other definitions: 4 Black. Com. 37; 1 Kyd, Corp. 13; 2 Glover, 8; 1 Black. Com. 468. It Grant, Corp. 3, 4; Angell & Ames, is scarcely ever quite safe to express or Corp. 1; Glover, Corp. 3, 6. Will- even to illustrate a legal proposition in cock declines to define, but describes figurative language, but the simile of corporations. Munic. Corp. 15. The the elegant English commentator is last-named author observes that "a not only striking, but accurate. "All corporation continues the same body of the individual members," present politic from its creation to its dissolution, unaltered by the revolution of ages or the successive changes of its members, so that it is unnecessary to make grants to them and their successors, or to declare their obligations binding on their successors." Ib. 16;

and future, "are but one person in law, - a person that never dies, in like manner as the river Thames is still the same river, though the parts which compose it are changing every instant." 1 Black. Com. 468.

the country, but chiefly to regulate and administer the local or internal affairs of the city, town, or district which is incorporated.1

§ 32 (20). Distinguishing Features of Municipal Corporations. We may, therefore, define a municipal corporation in its historical and strict sense to be the incorporation, by the authority of the government, of the inhabitants of a particular place or district, and authorizing them in their corporate capacity to exercise subordinate specified powers of legislation and regulation with respect to their local and internal concerns. This power of local government is the distinctive purpose and the distinguishing feature of a municipal corporation proper. The phrase "municipal corporation" is used