THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENT IN GOOD CITY GOVERNMENT.

CHARLES J. BONAPARTE, BALTIMORE.

The present is the eighth conference to promote good city government in the United States held under the auspices of the National Municipal League. I learn from our secretary that no less than four hundred and fifty-nine associations, or groups of associations, have been invited to take part in its proceedings, every section of this country being represented among them. and all having for, at least, one of their objects to promote good government in one or more of our American cities. The great majority of these societies have been formed since the organization of the League six years ago, and we hear of a new one with analogous aims almost daily. They invariably count among their members the most generally esteemed, enlightened and philanthropic citizens of their respective communities; they have been organized among women, as well as men, and in almost every class of society.

It is a safe inference from an agitation so spontaneous and so widespread that the subject of good city government has attracted general attention, and awakens a lively interest in the American people, and it cannot, I think, be otherwise than timely to submit for public consideration some suggestions as to the really vital conditions of the problem involved, and to remove if possible what seem, to me at least, to be serious misconceptions as to certain of its features.

To have a good city government in the United States we must, first of all, and before all else, have good citizens. Burke's well known words have been often quoted; they have been even quoted more than once by me; but we cannot too steadily remember that, as he said: "There never was long a corrupt government of a

virtuous people." When we find any self-governing community afflicted with chronic misgovernment, we can safely and fairly believe that it does not deserve a better fate. It may indeed wish to be well governed, just as many a drunkard, in his seasons of repentance and headache, wishes he were temperate, just as many a defaulter, as yet undetected, in saner moments wishes he could repay what he has taken, and feel himself once more an honest man. But, as such men do not wish hard enough to keep away, the first from the bar, the second from the faro table or Wall street, so such a nation, state or city does not wish hard enough for good government to make bad government impossible. I remember the story of a man who had been run over in the street: a sympathizing crowd gathered around him, and many expressions of compassion were heard. A preoccupied man, hurrying to his business, stopped, took in the situation with a rapid glance, and said: "Well, friends, I pity him one dollar's worth for a hack to take him home; how much do you pity him?" Of course, we are all patriots, especially in a presidential year, but what is the value in dollars and cents, in sacrifices of money, time or personal inclination, of our patriotism? We long to see good and wise men in public office, the people's burdens light, the people's work well done; but if we put this longing in the scales, what will overbalance it? Will blind and paltry prejudices of party or race or class or creed outweigh it? Will some mean and trivial gratification to self-interest or vanity outweigh it? say, the hope of quartering an incompetent relative or dependent on the taxpayers for support? say, the prospect of becoming a presidential elector or a colonel or general on the governor's staff? Will sheer indolence and cowardice outweigh it? the dread of unaccustomed distasteful work? the fear of abuse and personal enmity? Will it be found wanting when matched against the mere squeamishness which runs away from coarse and ugly surroundings, however vital the task to be done in their midst, much as a man might rather die of typhoid fever than clean out a sink? If such is the measure of our patriotism, if such is the moral advoirdupois of our citizenship, we need not wonder, we ought not to complain, if, while we are finding excuses for not doing the work of our government in our interest, some one else

does it for us in his own. You have all heard the well known fable of the man who sells his soul to the devil: Satan is to give him wealth and high station and worldly prosperity in return, and does it; the other party to the contract, after getting the agreed price, always tries to cheat him out of he goods sold, but the devil is too bright for him and enforces specific performance, according to the letter of the bond. We should like to thus deal with those who rule us, to have them spare us all the burdens of our freedom, and yet gives us all its benefits; but they don't do it.

Because we cannot expect a perfect government, whether of an American city or of anything anywhere else, unless and until the people governed are also perfect, which is not likely to happen, here or elsewhere, in our time, the conclusion is not infrequently drawn that meantime any improvement is hopeless; but this is a grave mistake. No doubt, as there never has been, so there never will be, a perfect government of men by men; but there have been, there are now, much better governments of great cities than those we live under in the United States of today, and I believe that there might be better city governments now and here than any which the world has known in this country or any other. The true lesson is that the question of good government in American cities is essentially a moral and only incidentally a political one; indeed this is true of all governments in all countries, but more clearly and emphatically true of a popular municipal government that of any other. I mean by this that what the friends of good government in America, and especially in American cities, have to do is much less to devise methods for the efficient and economical administration of public affairs than to clearly and frequently set forth and constantly and forcibly impress on the attention of their fellow-citizens the true and admitted ends and principles of government and the daily manifest and grievous derelictions of duty on the part of public officers and of the voters. If, for example, one finds some great department of a city government, through which millions of dollars of public money are annually spent, in a welter of confusion, extravagance and suspected peculation, the remedy is, not to give its head a new name or to put it in the hands of three men instead of one or vice versa, but to thoroughly expose its abuses, ad

equately punish the man or men responsible for them, and give it a head (how called and whether made up of one person or of more than one are matters of very subordinate importance) under whom such abuses shall become, and be seen by all to have become impossible for the future.

I must not be understood to mean that constitutional provisions and laws and ordinances, or systems and rules of administration may not be material factors in the problem; what I wish to make clear is that they are not vital factors; the one thing indispensable, the one thing without which good government of any kind or degree is impossible, and which, under reasonable limitations, takes the place and supplies the want of all others, is good men. If you have as public officers men thoroughly honorable and conscientious and also sufficiently intelligent and sufficiently educated to understand and discharge their duties, you will have, whatever the defeats of your statutes or customs, a good government; if your places of public trust are filled by ignorant, incompetent, self-seeking or unscrupulous men, you may multiply checks and balances, you may devise all sorts of ingenious and complicated safeguards, but, whatever its scientific merits in theory, your machine of government will, in practice, work ill. Institutions are in politics what fortifications are in war; each, if well planned, may aid good and brave men to do their duty; neither can take the place of such men. It was not breastworks or rifle pits that stopped Pickett at Gettysburg; a brave enemy will ever have a picnic with forts and big guns and all sorts of elaborate engines of destruction whose defenders take to their heels; and in administration, no less than in warfare, it is, after all, the human element that counts.

Neither would I discourge the careful and scientific study of questions of government; no more worthy or more promising field of inquiry can be offered to the mind of man. Indeed a very striking and encouraging phenomenon in American society is the general and increasing interest in such questions at all our leading seats of learning; moreover, I, at least, see in the widespread popular concern with this subject, to which I have already referred, the fruit, in great part, of much quiet reading and thinking, writing and talking, in such regions during the past

decade. In no small measure the "d-n literary fellers" have "gone into politics," though not precisely as the politicians would understand the term, and the results of their doing so are good for them and good for the American people.

But, whilst I would be the last to discountenance the most painstaking research or the collation of all attainable information on these topics, I would interpose one word of warning: by all means study, but, in the meantime, act. The science of medicine has made immense progress during this century, but, while men of research have repeatedly revolutionized it by their inventions and discoveries, men of action have all the time fought disease, eased pain, saved life by methods which next year became obsolete but this year served their ends. They could not tell a mother whose child had diphtheria that, when they had learned by a few months more of experiment just what to think of anti-toxine, they would come and treat him; the merits of the treatment would scarcely interest her as she returned from laying flowers on his grave. As with our bodily ailments, so with those of our body politic; we must cure them as best we can while we learn how to cure them better. Those who have leisure and learning and a facile pen can with great profit to all of us write monographs and pamphlets and magazine articles on proportional representation and the referendum and the Gothenburg liquor system, and their work will tell in time; but, while they read and think and write, this rascal has been nominated by a packed convention chosen at fraudulent primaries and that rascal has been caught with his arms up to the elbow in the people's money box, and the ordinary every-day citizen is saying, with our old friend Tweed: "Well, what are you, you reformers, going to do about it ?"

The question is a fair one, for in the cases supposed, and they occur daily, there is something to be done, and, I must add, that reformers are too often prone to overlook this necessity, while they explain how nothing of this kind could happen, if only their favorite panacea for all existing or conceivable evils had been or were now applied. This may be cumulative voting or minority representation or direct legislation or female suffrage or prohibition or the single tax or any one of many more schemes to