are being made the gift of the voters through
petitions and primaries; efficient reforms in the taxing and budgetary
machinery have been instituted, and the development of the merit system
in the civil service is creating a class of municipal experts beyond the
reach of political gangsters.

There have sprung up all sorts of collateral organizations to help
the officials: societies for municipal research, municipal reference
libraries, citizens' unions, municipal leagues, and municipal parties.
These are further supplemented by organizations which indirectly add to
the momentum of practical, enlightened municipal sentiment: boards
of commerce, associations of business and professional men of every
variety, women's clubs, men's clubs, children's clubs, recreation clubs,
social clubs, every one with its own peculiar vigilance upon some corner
of the city's affairs. So every important city is guarded by a network
of voluntary organizations.

All these changes in city government, in municipal laws and political
mechanisms, and in the people's attitude toward their cities, have
tended to dignify municipal service. The city job has been lifted to a
higher plane. Lord Rosebery, the brilliant chairman of the first London
County Council, the governing body of the world's largest city, said
many years ago: "I wish that my voice could extend to every municipality
in the kingdom, and impress upon every man, however high his position,
however great his wealth, however consummate his talents may be, the
importance and nobility of municipal work." It is such a spirit as
this that has made the government of Glasgow a model of democratic
efficiency; and it is the beginnings of this spirit that the municipal
historian finds developing in the last twenty years of American life. It
is indeed difficult to see how our cities can slip back again into the
clutches of bosses and rings and repeat the shameful history of the last
decades of the nineteenth century.

CHAPTER VII. LEGISLATIVE OMNIPOTENCE

The American people, when they wrote their first state constitutions,
were filled with a profound distrust of executive authority, the
offspring of their experience with the arbitrary King George. So they
saw to it that the executive authority in their own government was
reduced to its lowest terms, and that the legislative authority, which
was presumed to represent the people, was exalted to legal omnipotence.
In the original States, the l