required in a large city. Obviously under such
circumstances city government must become more or less of a mystery to
the great mass of citizens. They cannot watch its operations as the
inhabitants of a small village can watch the proceedings of their
township and county governments. Much work must go on which cannot
even be intelligently criticised without such special knowledge as it
would be idle to expect in the average voter, or perhaps in any voter.
It becomes exceedingly difficult for the taxpayer to understand just
what his money goes for, or how far the city expenses might reasonably
be reduced; and it becomes correspondingly easy for municipal
corruption to start and acquire a considerable headway before it can
be detected and checked.

[Sidenote: In some respects it is more of a mystery that state and
national government.]
In some respects city government is harder to watch intelligently
than the government of the state or of the nation. For these wider
governments are to some extent limited to work of general supervision.
As compared with the city, they are more concerned with the
establishment and enforcement of certain general principles, and less
with the administration of endlessly complicated details. I do not
mean to be understood as saying that there is not plenty of intricate
detail about state and national governments. I am only comparing one
thing with another, and it seems to me that one chief difficulty with
city government is the bewildering vastness and multifariousness of
the details with which it is concerned. The modern city has come to be
a huge corporation for carrying on a huge business with many branches,
most of which call for special aptitude and training.

[Sidenote: The mayor at first had too little power.]
As these points have gradually forced themselves upon public attention
there has been a tendency in many of our large cities toward
remodeling their governments on new principles. The most noticeable
feature of this tendency is the increase in the powers of the mayor.

A hundred years ago our legislators and constitution-makers were much
afraid of what was called the "one-man power." In nearly all the
colonies a chronic quarrel had been kept up between the governors
appointed by the king and the legislators elected by the people, and
this had made the "one-man power" very unpopular. Besides, it was
something that had been unpopular in ancient Greece and Rome, and it
was thoug