Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/400

396 and allow a wide diversity in methods, it must maintain a general supervisory control over these subjects. In other words, the city government is not only an organ for the satisfaction of local needs, but an agent of the state for the performance of state functions. The doctrine of home rule recognizes this. It renders to the city the things that are the city's, and to the state the things that are the state's.

So defined—and it has been so defined by the states which have written it into their fundamental law—the principle of municipal home rule may be regarded as the first step in the direction of a responsible and efficient city government. Wherever it has been put into the constitution of a state a larger municipal vision has been created and a new brand of municipal administration has appeared. Thus it is a significant fact that many of the most advanced forms of city government have grown up in the cities which have enjoyed constitutional home rule. Given the right to determine its own destiny, the city becomes the hope, instead of the despair, of democracy. And the test which democracy receives will be a fair one.