Council Government Versus Mayor Government (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Council Government Versus Mayor Government We are first of all confronted with the argument from our own municipal experience. We are told that the American city council has proved itself in practice unfit to be trusted. Its powers have been taken away only because it has abused them. Whatever methods of election or of organization have been tried, it has been found impossible to secure good council men. The system of council rule worked well enough in the early days, with simple administrative problems and a compara tively high qualification for the electorate. But with the intro duction of universal suffrage, the inżux of foreign immigrants, the intrusion of party politics and the growth of municipal functions, the system broke down completely. These state ments are usually made as if they were self-evident common places of history. Seldom is any detailed study brought to their support. But historical evidence must be handled with the greatest care in order to be conclusive. Failure rightly to analyze causes and effects and to take account of differences in conditions is apt to vitiate our reasoning. Not yet have we sużicient knowledge of municipal history or sużicient outlook into the future to justify dogmatic conclusions as to the relative success of council rule and mayor rule. A few considerations may be presented, however, which show how comparatively weak is this argument in favor of the mayor system from our experience in city government. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.