usually does so subject to the approval, of the
city council or of one branch of it. The mayor is usually not a member
of the city council, but can veto its enactments, which however can be
passed over his veto by a two thirds majority.

[Sidenote: They do not seem to work well.]
[Sidenote: some difficulties to be stated.]
City governments thus constituted are something like state governments
in miniature. The relation of the mayor to the city council is
somewhat like that of the governor to the state legislature, and of
the president to the national congress. In theory nothing could well
be more republican, or more unlike such city governments as those of
New York and Philadelphia before the Revolution. Yet in practice it
does not seem to work well. New York and Philadelphia seem to
have heard as many complaints in the nineteenth century as in the
eighteenth, and the same kind of complaints,--of excessive taxation,
public money wasted or embezzled, ill-paved and dirty streets,
inefficient police, and so on to the end of the chapter. In most of
our large cities similar evils have been witnessed, and in too many of
the smaller ones the trouble seems to be the same in kind, only less
in degree. Our republican government, which, after making all due
allowances, seems to work remarkably well in rural districts, and in
the states, and in the nation, has certainly been far less successful
as applied to cities. Accordingly our cities have come to furnish
topics for reflection to which writers and orators fond of boasting
the unapproachable excellence of American institutions do not like to
allude. Fifty years ago we were wont to speak of civil government
in the United States as if it had dropped from heaven or had been
specially created by some kind of miracle upon American soil; and we
were apt to think that in mere republican forms there was some kind of
mystic virtue which made them a panacea for all political evils. Our
later experience with cities has rudely disturbed this too confident
frame of mind. It has furnished facts which do not seem to fit our
self-complacent theory, so that now our writers and speakers are
inclined to vent their spleen upon the unhappy cities, perhaps too
unreservedly. We hear them called "foul sinks of corruption" and
"plague spots on our body politic." Yet in all probability our cities
are destined to increase in number and to grow larger and larger; so
that perhaps it is just as well to con