Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/93

 MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT AND DEMOCRA TIC IDEALS 77

depend upon private effort for their solution. The widening gap between the life of the community and the activities of our city governments is impressing itself on every student of American city life. The first step in the development of greater civic vigor is a method of bridging this gap which shall include, primarily, such an extension of municipal functions that the community will be enabled to grapple with the problems which cannot be solved without organized action; and, secondly, such a readjustment of the machinery of government that positive action will be fostered, rather than being made increasingly difficult, as it is under our present system. The ideas of governmental organization which we have borrowed from an earlier period, and which have worked great good as applied to our state and federal governments, are no longer applicable to the conditions that prevail in our cities.

If we examine the history of city government during the last fifty years, we find that slowly and with great reluctance we are beginning to acknowledge, in fact if not in theory, that the political ideas which have dominated our political thinking for more than a century are no longer adequate to meet the complex conditions of modern city life. We continue to reason as if the political principles of the eighteenth century had lost none of their force, but the pressure of circumstances has nevertheless forced us to make certain compromises, the full import of which we have hardly begun to realize.

Our inherited notions of democratic government have dictated a form of city organization in which the local representative assembly or city council occupies an important position. The same political traditions dictate that the higher administrative officials of the city, no matter what their functions, shall be chosen by popular election. It is a significant fact that this tena- cious adherence to what we regard as the essentials of democracy has been contemporaneous with a totally different movement in other branches of administrative activity. The management of great business enterprises is being concentrated in the executive heads of industrial corporations. The responsibility for the con- duct of the affairs of educational and charitable institutions is likewise drifting from the board to the single executive head.