So far from official accountability in regular forms being an abridgment of local self-government, it is the foundation on which this system can alone be built up. Arbitrary or irresponsible power finds no place in our popular system of government. The public officers are the trustees of the people. The majority are trustees for the whole, for the minority, and for each individual.

At the present time the Senate and Assembly, and the Governor, are largely occupied by attention to measures which are in the nature of appeals from the local administrative officials. Legislation is daily asked for, not merely for the purpose of enlarging or modifying the powers of those officials according to the local wants, but for overruling their judgment, correcting their errors, and redressing their wrongs. The granting or refusing of such legislation often involves questions of extreme difficulty, to investigate and decide the merits of which is quite beyond the power of the legislative bodies, or the Governor, especially in the multitude of topics that accumulate in the closing weeks of the session.

EXPERIENCE OF THE METROPOLIS.

The most instructive chapter on the subject of municipal government which is to be found in our civic history, is the experience of our great metropolis which stands so conspicuous, not only in this State, but throughout the Union and before the world.

As great cities are rapidly growing up in other parts of the State, we may study that experience with advantage. Anterior to the Constitution of 1846, the practical governing population of this State was agricultural. Comparatively little attention had been paid to municipal government. In that instrument, while county and town systems receive comparative protection, the charters of cities and incorporated villages were left almost absolutely within the control of the Legislature.

CHARTER OF 1830.

The city of New York had gone on under a simple, popular government which had many elements of great value. Substantially, the administration was conducted by the mayor and two boards of the common council, their committees, and the officers appointed by them. The elections were separate, in the spring of the year, and were annual. Popular opinion easily became effectual in controlling the policy of government. A political revolution was frequently produced by the charge of excessive expenditure on the part of the city government. The liability to change, the exposure to publicity made any elaborate and prolonged plans of plunder unsafe, if not impossible.

It is not meant that the deterioration that afterward ensued is to be ascribed wholly to the new methods of government adopted.

INJURIOUS CHANGES.

Doubtless important changes have occurred in the conditions under which the municipal government is carried on. Changes in the population-a loss of the habit of acting in city affairs, resulting from the inability to act with effect during twenty years in which the elective power of the people has been nugatory-decay of civic training forced exclusion and voluntary withdrawal from participation in local government for a generation-the absorption of the public attention in the controversies of national politics, leading to an almost total neglect of the questions of administration on which the competitions of politics formerly turned-the vast disproportion in the numerical strength of parties formed on sectional questions; these are causes which make the machinery of popular government work less favorably than before.

But it cannot be doubted that various changes, originating in a false theory of government and continuing through a series of years, by which the legislative power

was very much weakened, and the spending officers became not only exempt from any regulation by the legislative bodies and practically irresponsible, but by means of their patronage acquired practical control in the government, and a complexity of system by which the elective power of the people became ineffectual—were steps in a downward progress.

INTERFERENCE WITH LOCAL GOVERNMENT.

The abuses and wrongs of the local administration which found no redress generated a public opinion under which appeals was made, in the name of reform, for relief to the legislative power at Albany; and it was found that an act could be easily contrived whereby one official could be expelled from office, and, by some device, a substitute put in his place. It was found likewise that the powers of an office could be withdrawn and vested in a different officer or in a commission, the selection of which could be dictated from the State Capitol.

It is the experience of human government that abuses of power follow power wherever it goes. What was at first done, apparently at least, to protect the rights of the minority or of individuals; what was first done for the sake of good government, came in a little time to be done for the purposes of interested individuals or cliques. Differing in politics as city and State did, party selfishness and ambition grasped at patronage and power, and the great municipal trust came to be the traffic of the lobbies. Institutions wholly unfit to answer any use or object of government in a civilized community, and by virtue of their structure capable of nothing but abuses growing into crimes against the communities in which they existed, such as the board of supervisors, erected in 1857, came into existence under the motive power of the division of the spoils which they partitioned between their contrivers, combining equal numbers from both parties.

CHARTER OF 1870.

The consummation of this deceptive system was in the charter of 1870, which was enacted in the name and under the pretense of restoring local self-government. It was a long document, full of minute regulations, copied from preceding laws; but its vital force and real object resided in a few sentences. It totally stripped the elective councils of all legislative power, and covered up that design by several pages, in which it enumerated ordinances the councils had, from time immemorial, power to establish, but which had never been thought worthy of mention in any previous act of legislation.

It practically vested all legislative power in the mayor, comptroller, commissioner of public works and the commissioner of parks. It vacated the offices of the existing incumbents at the end of five days, and provided for the appointment of their successors by the then existing mayor who was one of the quartet. Every device to make these four officers totally irresponsible was carefully adopted. The existing law, which had stood for many years, by which the mayor, comptroller and street commissioner had been removable by the Governor, as in the case of sheriffs, was repealed. A restoration of that power of removal, as regards the mayor, was demanded in the following year, and in 1873, was accorded, with the unanimous consent of both political parties.

This charter, which practically put in abeyance the elective power of the people of the city of New York for years, and set up an oligarchy of four persons, who, aided by a subsequent amendment, had all powers of expenditure and taxation-of legislation and administration over a million people, was enacted under the pretense of restoring local self-government. It was objected at the time that those officers so appointed were, to all practical intents and purposes, a commission, just as under the system which was to be abolished, that they were, in effect, as much appointed

by the State Legislature as if their names had been inserted in the law; and that the elective power of the people was annulled, and rulers set over them without their consent.

How unanimously that charter passed — by what barter of the municipal trusts and corrupt use of municipal money and how, within a month, the officers placed by a legislative act, without the intervention of a new election, in supreme dominion over a million of our people, divided up four millions of a pretended audit of six millions, are now matters of history. These were the fruits, not of a popular election, not of local self-government, but of the culmination of a system under which the governing officials had been practically appointed by legislative acts of the State. The device of creating a special appointing power to do what was desired by a clique or party, or was agreed upon beforehand, was not perfectly new. It had been frequently used in a smaller way.

The contagion of such practices threatens to extend to other cities. If public opinion and the state of the Constitution and laws allow it, the temptation to transfer the contest for offices from the local elections to the legislative halls will arise as often as aspirants are defeated and can expect to recover there what they have lost at home. There is no remedy but in the refusal to give to such devices the sanction of law, until constitutional provision shall give permanency to the methods of appointment and removal in municipal governments.

1873.

The charter of 1873, while it contains many provisions that are valuable, still leaves to the heads of departments the power to create offices and fix their salaries, which no one has ever thought of conferring on the Governor or the Comptroller of the State, who are properly subject to the specific and minute regulations of law; and it leaves all the power of levying taxes, spending money, contracting debt,