yourself. Human experience certainly proves that this is the
only absolutely safe way. The next best way is to send some competent
person to do it for you; and if there is no one competent to be
had, you do the next best thing and entrust the work to the least
incompetent person you can find. If you entrust it to a committee your
prospect of getting it done is diminished and it grows less if
you enlarge your committee. By the time you have got a group of
committees, independent of one another and working at cross purposes,
you have got Dickens's famous Circumlocution Office, where the great
object in life was "how not to do it."

[Sidenote 1: Increase of city debts.]

[Sidenote 2: Attempt to cure the evil by state interference;
experience of New York.]

Amid the general dissatisfaction over the extravagance and
inefficiency of our city governments, people's attention was first
drawn to the rapid and alarming increase of city indebtedness in
various parts of the country. A heavy debt may ruin a city as surely
as an individual, for it raises the rate of taxation, and thus, as was
above pointed out, it tends to frighten people and capital away from
the city. At first it was sought to curb the recklessness of city
councils in incurring lavish expenditures by giving the mayor a veto
power. Laws were also passed limiting the amount of debt which a city
would be allowed to incur under any circumstances. Clothing the
mayor with the veto power is now seen to have been a wise step; and
arbitrary limitation of the amount of debt, though a clumsy expedient,
is confessedly a necessary one. But beyond this, it was in some
instances attempted to take the management of some departments of city
business out of the hands of the city and put them into the hands of
the state legislature. The most notable instance of this was in New
York in 1857. The results, there and elsewhere, have been generally
regarded as unsatisfactory. After a trial of thirty years the
experience of New York has proved that a state legislature is not
competent to take proper care of the government of cities. Its
members do not know enough about the details of each locality, and
consequently local affairs are left to the representatives from each
locality, with "log-rolling" as the inevitable result. A man fresh
from his farm on the edge of the Adirondacks knows nothing about the
problems pertaining to electric wires in Broadway, or to rapid transit
between Harl