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RAMSHACKLE COUNTY GOVERNMENT

paper from him, and make a very much better living from it. The publisher can very well afford to make the county boss a present of a nice block of stock or to run free of charge the advertisement of the boss's private business if he gets this public advertising.

So it comes about that the first practical steps toward the reform of county politics must usually take the shape of an attempt to buy the control of a newspaper and run it uncontaminated by public advertising patronage-a highly precarious business venture.

BEHIND THE CENSORSHIP

Now let us lift a corner of this blanket of silence that covers county government and see what we find. The Comptroller of the State of New York has power to send examiners to any county to investigate and report upon its financial methods. The law was a dead letter until Mr. Glynn, afterwards Governor, became Comptroller and secured an appropriation for the salaries of a few examiners. They had no difficulty in finding wanton use of the taxpayers' money in nearly every county, not with criminal intent, to be sure, but in a spirit of simple recklessness. They found irregularities in every county. They have now covered fifty-seven of them, and the head of the staff says: "In not a single county examined has there been found compliance with every provision of law."

In Broome County the county boss had so manipulated things that he was able to draw upon the county's funds for his private benefit whenever he pleased, and he pleased rather often. The unexpected visit of the Comptroller's examiners caught him with a large shortage and he committed suicide. The impression which the event made upon the people of Broome County was probably quite fairly expressed by his successor in office, who stood before a committee of the Constitutional Convention not long after and asserted that there was no popular unrest in Broome nor any desire to change the system!

Graft in county government is just as oldfashioned as county government itself, just as much behind the times, just as lacking in modern refinement. When you enter county politics, you step back into the days of Tweed. If you protest at things you find, you get the same answer, "What are you going to do about it?" And there isn't much you can do.

When a committee of citizens ventured to ask the treasurer of Cook County, Illinois, to let them see whether the county was get

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ting all the interest it should on his balances of $10,000,000 (little details like this not being made public), he refused. They tried to find out what they could do about it, and ended up by publishing a pamphlet. When the treasurer's term finally expired, they easily obtained signed and detailed promises of reforms from all the thirteen new candidates for this post. The winner, the present incumbent, was especially conciliatory. His zeal seems to have petered out, for he fought off a proposed law to make him keep his pledge by getting it amended so as not to take effect until after his term expires in 1918, and he did not let the public into his precious secret at the end of 1915.

In 1910 the State examiners went through the affairs of a certain county in the Hudson River district, New York, and reported that the county treasurer was keeping certain fees that belonged to the county. When they came around again in 1914, they found that their 1910 report had not disturbed anybody sufficiently to prevent several thousand dollars more from going the same way.

In one such case in another county the supervisors loyally voted to the incriminated officer his regular salary of $10,000 “plus such sums as he may have illegally taken in the past."

Which shows what you can do about it if you try!

ANTIQUATED STANDARDS

The work of the county has become expert work. In the simple days of our grandfathers a man of common horse sense could run an almshouse or a county jail or a taxcollector's office or build a road, and easily achieve the primitive standards of those times.

Nowadays the proper care of the unfortu nates in an almshouse, for instance, is a highly specialized and technical profession. Men and women train for such duties in special schools and make it their life-work. Even such trained social workers will find an almshouse full of unsolved human problems requiring the most elaborate study, though the honest village merchant who takes for a few years the position of superintendent of the poor would not recognize the existence of any problems at all. The untrained visitor to an almshouse sees a clean and airy building containing a varied assortment of unfortunate humanity who are being well fed and kindly treated, and he goes away with a feeling that the county administration is excellent. The

social worker, however, observes epileptics without scientific care, undetected cases of feeble-mindedness, inebriates and drug victims who are not being trained out of their habits, victims of tuberculosis without the special system of treatment which their cases require, sufferers from chronic diseases, such as heart cases, rheumatism, cancer, and the more sinister ills, cripples who could be taught a trade if there were anybody available who knew how to teach them, and aged poor whose relatives have never been adequately looked up, the system for admissions being so lax that practically the county supports any one who applies.

All this is not the fault of the superintendent of the poor; it is the reasonable result of a ramshackle system of government. The superintendent is elective; that guarantees that he will not be an expert, but a local and transient amateur. He is forbidden to use his common sense by the Legislature, which, in its complicated poor law, provides written rules for every contigency, with results that may often be pathetic or ludicrous. Admissions to the almshouse are governed by the easy personal standards of a dozen to ten dozen local officers scattered around the county, the justices of the peace and the overseers of the poor, who have authority to commit to the almshouse. The money to operate the almshouse properly must be solicited from the Board of Supervisors, who, if they choose to make offhand slashes in the requested appropriation, take no responsibility for the results.

AMATEUR PENOLOGY

Or take the sheriff's office. Did you ever hear of a sheriff who was a penologist? So the typical county jail is a horror, a school for crime and unnatural sexual vices where men who are innocent, or at least not vicious, cannot possibly remain without becoming contaminated or callous to things that at the beginning of their incarceration they find revolting. At Utica a recent scandal brought the sheriff's office into the courts, where it was learned that the jail had seen scenes of open debauchery with women prisoners, officers of the jail, and friends of the latter from outside.

The sheriff is commonly compensated by fees. This still survives even in New York County, where the fees net the sheriff $60,000 a year in addition to the comfortable salary of $12,000. Efforts are made from time to time to amend the law and steer these fees

into the treasury, but there is no assurance that the plan would work. Hudson County, New Jersey, tried that, and, instead of deriving a nice revenue from the sheriff's office, the county acquired an annual deficit, for patronage multiplied and thrift declined when the fruits of economy were no longer the sheriff's private perquisites.

COUNTY BOUNDARIES

Cities change their boundaries incessantly to keep in correct adjustment with shifts of population, but county boundaries remain immutable as they were a hundred years ago, except when one county is divided into two in order to make an extra set of jobs. That is the way Bronx County was erected within the boundaries of the County of New York. Bronx set up in business separately at a new expense of $700,000 a year, but the expenses of the remaining half of the county have continued undiminished.

The most offhand study of the county map in any State will disclose many misfits. The county seat is often remote from the center of the county, perhaps down in one corner. Often it is in a little village far from the main routes of modern transportation. Sometimes the county will straddle a mountain range or will in other ways attempt to ignore topography. In numberless cases the counties are too small in size or in population to be economical and could save a large part of their annual expenses by consolidation. Yet it never seems to occur to anybody to work for a readjustment and modernization of county geography.

MISFIT UNIFORMITY

The same spirit of complacent stagnation permits the inflexible framework of government which took its present shape amid the simple conditions of seventy years ago to remain uniform for all kinds and shapes of counties, regardless of differing conditions. One great county has a trifling population scattered over an immense territory, another county may consist of a compact group of little villages, a third will be co-extensive with a city government, while another is half metropolitan and half rural, and the framework of county government is identical for all of them.

Any form of organization which attempts to be a common denominator for so many different types of counties ought to be primitively simple, a mere skeleton, and a model

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so far as it goes. But the framework of county government as laid down in the written law is no skeleton. A diagram of it looks like a ball of yarn after the cat has got through with it.

In its form of organization the typical county is ideally bad. It is almost completely disjointed. Each officer is independent of all the rest, standing on his own separate pedestal of popular election with a full right to tell all the other county officers to go to glory. It is like an automobile with a separate motor at every wheel, each going its own gait.

Nominally the board of supervisors is at the head of the county because it holds the purse-strings; but the power of the purse is only partial, inasmuch as a multitude of laws fastens various charges upon the county and sets the salaries of a great many of its subordinate officers. Practically the board's only power consists of an ability to hamper the other elective officials by making restricted appropriations. It has no other real power to supervise them or to compel them to expend the appropriations with care and discretion.

Even if they had the power, the board of supervisors is not properly organized or equipped to handle such a task. The running of a county is a complex administrative problem, requiring incessant and active supervision; but the supervisors meet only at stated intervals, quarterly or monthly, for instance, and are in no position to keep continuous oversight over affairs. Frequently the board. is too large to be anything but a debating society, anyway.

PATCHWORK LEGISLATION

So the State Legislature steps in, and every time one county official is impolite to some other county official somebody takes the train to the capital and a new law is passed to rectify the difficulty. In effect these interminable minute memoranda, called laws, lay down the office rules of county government and attempt to decree fraternal love among county officers. Witness the plea, made on behalf of the sheriff of Rensselaer County, exhibited in the title of the following bill, which passed the New York Legislature of 1915:

An Act providing for the appointment by the sheriff of Rensselaer County, of an under sheriff, jailers, watchman, matron, cooks, janitors, process servers, firemen, and court officers, and for their compensation and duties.

Perhaps the supervisors had been stingy, perhaps the sheriff's ideas were extravagant,

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but the point is that when under the present system two branches of the county government disagree, this ridiculous spectacle of the State Legislature solemnly enacting a law settling the salary of the cook of a certain county jail exhibits the typical method of relief. This endless legislative tinkering, even if it were always sincerely done, serves its temporary purpose, remains unrepealed and forgotten on the statute-books, and becomes a permanent nuisance. The usual remedy, if a county officer fails to come up to these written requirements, is some kind of a mandamus proceedings or action by the district attorney against the county officer or his bondsman.

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A county official is lucky if he has a really clear idea of what his own duties are. The much patched and often contradictory statutes which are supposed to govern his administrative procedure in detail are scattered through from three to twenty different gen eral laws. As a rule he is no lawyer, and if he undertook the research his term might end before he was ready for business. cordingly tradition becomes the guiding star of every county officer, for no matter how slight and innocent a variation he may make from precedent in the interests of efficiency, he is liable to find that he is violating some unheard-of statute. Many of the laws are out of date, anyway, and county officials, revolting at the senseless red tape, often disregard them for the sake of the taxpayers. That is why every student of county government soon finds that the laws in the library give him an incorrect idea of what county officials are doing.

To turn back to Westchester County again, which is quoted so often here because it is the most thoroughly explored county government in the United States: the officials of the County Research Bureau, after working for six years in intimate touch with county problems, declare that their county could be run better for less than half the present cost and with half the number of men. But they freely concede that they would not care to undertake it without radical revision of the laws and governmental organization.

OBSCURITY AND THE LONG BALLOT

No one can peer into the cobwebs of county government without developing the deepest sympathy for the many conscientious and unappreciated public servants who are

trying to operate the present antiquated mechanism. The same obscurity which protects the crook also prevents good work from being rewarded. Theoretically the public official who does his duty will be promptly supported by public opinion, but the fact is that the people of the county know very little about his official conduct, and if he comes in conflict with some other officer, the people, who constitute his only court of appeal, are in no position to determine the merits of the controversy. There are so many office-holders to watch that public opinion is baffled and ends by keeping track of almost none of them. The voter has four National officers to select, a dozen State and judicial officers, and a string of township and village or city officials, anywhere from thirty to a hundred altogether, to be elected in the course of a four-year cycle. What chance has this or that county officer to get into the spotlight where his good deeds may be appreciated? He is only one of from two hundred to fourteen hundred office-holders who are elective in the county. He is lost in the shuffle. The people of the county may happen to be familiar with his personality—in rural counties they often are-but there still remains the impossible task for them to keep track of his official activities and appraise his work, which, of course, is largely technical. The county clerk in New York, for example, is elected. It is therefore presumably the duty of the people, and of no one else, to see that he performs his duty under the penal law, banking law, lien law, executive law, tax law, fish, forest, and game law, prison law, liquor tax law, domestic relations law, partnership law, public officers' law, general business law, judiciary law, real property law, legislative law, town law, decedent estate law, and county law!

VIOLATES SHORT BALLOT PRINCIPLES

County officers, except the governing board, are not in any proper sense representative officers, and democracy gains nothing by keeping them in politics. There is not legitimate Republican way or Socialist way or Progressive way of being county clerk or superintendent of highways. A member of New York's recent Constitutional Convention argued that when the people elected a Republican to build the roads they thereby ordered all the jobs to be transferred to Republicans, making the roads all good Republican roads. But he was mistaken. Political

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science-there is such a thing, but no true American will respect it-teaches that no technical office should be elective; none, in fact, except truly representative offices where the function is to interpret public opinion. Members of the Legislature, Congressmen, aldermen, and county supervisors (or whatever you call them in your State) should be amateurs, spokesmen for the people, samples of the ignorance as well as of the enlightenment of the voters, and from them all the others, the experts, should take their orders. That is the pathway toward efficiency and economy.

But it is also the pathway toward the bigger goal of a real democracy that will democ." Bossism is not democracy. Ring

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rule is not democracy. Government by a ruling class called "the politicians" is not democracy. And county government is not democracy-it doesn't "democ."

County government, on the contrary, is ideally designed to resist popular control. One way of concealing a public officer from effective public scrutiny is to make his office so small that it will inevitably fail to command public attention. A second way is to have so many elective officers that the public cannot possibly keep track of them all. A third way to baffle the public is to divide the responsibility, so that each public officer under attack can excuse himself on the ground that the necessary co-operation of some other officer was lacking. County government involves the liberal use of all three of these expedients; and so, in spite of its superficial aspect, the county is the least democratic of all our political divisions.

Indeed, it is a standing menace to democracy. The unorganized citizenry cannot operate the present complex, rusty instrument. By always requiring a greater amount of popular participation in government than the citizens are willing to furnish, it removes itself beyond the grip of the rank-and-file voters and lapses into the hands of the political machines. If the citizens of a given county want to displace the dominant political machine, they can do so only by the expedient of building up another machine to supplant it, and the new machine, like the old one, will continue to be the real guiding force in county affairs, selecting the public officers and telling them what to do. In fact, the private political machine, simple, well unified, and efficient, but powerless to resist the intrusion of corrupt men, has often been the one element of strength to the official county government by compelling

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some degree of harmony among the latter's disorganized elements.

THE PROSPECT OF PROGRESS

County reform is in its infancy. There is no State in the Union which has worked out a good system. The embryo County Government Association of New York State is the only such association in the country. There is no one who is prepared to advance a plan for a model county government.

A satisfactory solution of the many problems can be worked out only by a steady process of evolution, under conditions that give scope for experiment, free from needless Constitutional restrictions. The counties must be free to advance individually and not in perpetual lockstep. Let the more progressive counties feel their way cautiously forward, to be followed by the others when the value of a given step is clearly proved by experience.

The path of progress will surely be in the general direction of unification and simplification. Some of the elective officers must be transferred to the appointive list, and those who remain elective must be built up in power, influence, and conspicuousness until they command the discriminating attention of the electorate. The ballot must not continue to be too long to remember, but must be shortened sufficiently to come within the complete oversight of the voters. bility must be clearly located. The county must be given a definite head. The limbs and the body must be joined together and put under the easy control of a brain. Not otherwise can the people of a county secure

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an organism that will be an effective and obedient servant.

California took a hopeful step three years ago by allowing its counties to draw up charters of their own just as the cities did. Three counties have taken advantage of the opportunity, Los Angeles in particular making the notable improvement of getting thirteen officers off the elective list, and making local politics notably simpler and more popularly understandable. The People's Power League in Oregon, authors of the initiative and referendum in this country, have a scheme for mowing down their county jungle and substituting simplicity and directness by erecting a small elective commission which will hire a county manager, who in turn will appoint everybody else except the judge (who remains elective) and the prosecuting attorney (whom the Governor is to appoint). That line of progress is also indicated by the experience of cities in which the twin principles of the short ballot and the unification of powers have fructified in the commissionmanager plan of government. There are now thirty-six cities operating under that plan, and there will be hundreds within the next five years. The plan requires modification to fit it to counties, and there are difficult constitutional obstacles, but one of these days some county will make a start.

County government is the uttermost citadel of our political overlords, the one base of supplies from which they are never ousted. But its very rottenness as an institution guarantees that when it once starts to crumble it will go swiftly!

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