Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/443

 PROBLEMS OF MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATION 427

of prerogative and with the rights of property than with the spontaneous life of the people. They serenely incorporated laws and survivals which registered the successful struggle of the barons against the aggression of the sovereign, although the new country lacked both nobles and kings. Misled by the name of government, they founded their new cities by an involuntary reference to a lower social state than that which they actually saw about them. They depended upon penalties, coercion, compulsion, and remnants of military codes to hold the community together; and it may be possible to trace much of the maladministration of our cities to these survivals, to the fact that our early democracy was a moral romanticism, rather than a well-grounded belief in social capacity and in the efficiency of the popular will.

It has further happened that, as the machinery, groaning under the pressure of the new social demand put upon it, has broken down from time to time, we have mended it by giving more power to administrative officers, distrusting still further the will of the people. We are willing to cut off the dislocated part, or tighten the gearing, but we are afraid to substitute a machine of newer invention and greater capacity.

A little examination will easily show that, in spite of the fine phrases of the founders, the government became an entity by itself away from the daily life of the people; not meant to be set off against them with power to oppress, as in the case of the tra- ditional European governments, but simply because its machinery was so largely copied from the historic governments, which did distrust the people, that it failed to provide the vehicle for a vital and genuinely organized expression of the popular will. The founders carefully defined what was germane to government and that which was quite outside its realm ; whereas the very crux of local self-government, as has been well said, is involved in the "right locally to determine the scope of the local government," in response to the local needs as they arise.

They were anxious to keep the strings in the hands of the good and professedly public-spirited, because, having staked so much upon the people, whom they really knew so little, they became eager that they should appear well, and should not be