COUNTY PRISONS

But what of the treatment of the prisoner?

The county theoretically has very little to do with persons convicted of serious offenses. By far the greater number of the inmates of the prison are persons awaiting trial and therefore presumably innocent of wrongdoing. The minimum standard of justice demands that such persons be kept apart from hardened criminals. We shall see how this and other standards are observed in the county.

To begin with, it should be noted that the head of the jail, universally, is the sheriff. Bear in mind that this officer in forty-seven states is elective, that his term is usually very short, that he is usually ineligible to succeed himself and that he has numerous special duties to perform. It is therefore obvious that nothing but an exceptional piece of good luck can bring to the head of the jail an expert penologist. Often, too, he will be under contract with the board of supervisors to supply the prisoners with food at as good a profit to himself as may be.

In this atmosphere it is certainly not to be expected that the finest flowers of penology should grow. Massachusetts has so far fallen below standard as to call forth this stinging description from the Massachusetts Prison Association:

“In fact, in the county prisons nothing is done but to give the inmates custodial care. The man who goes to the reformatory is dealt with with a definite purpose to reform him. Another man goes to a county prison and comes out unchanged.

“Even worse is the indiscriminate association of all sorts of criminals in the county prisons. Beginners in crime are forced into close contact with hardened criminals. Men who are committed for being too poor to pay their fines for petty offenses, are compelled to associate with men who have spent their lives in crime. The county prison is, inevitably a school of crime.”[9]

The Prison Association in New York State is scarcely more complimentary concerning the prison conditions in that state. According to Mr. O. F. Lewis,[10], its secretary, the requirements of the statutes respecting the classification of prisoners appear to be systematically violated. Jails are frightfully overcrowded. The buildings are faultily constructed and unsanitary. For a prisoner to make a six-months’ stay in one of them is to undergo “the most serious possible contamination.”

The condition of the jails in Illinois is apparently no better, for the State Charities Commission reported recently,[11], there had been little improvement since the first examination of the former State Charities Board in 1870. A large majority of the jails were reported to be old and unsanitary. In seventy-two of one hundred and two counties, the law requiring the segregation of minors from adults was violated and in eleven counties there was no provision for women.

And so it goes. The county as a truly humanitarian agency has most lamentably failed. As to the underlying cause of the failure, this is suggested in a remark of the state prison inspector of Alabama in his report for 1914: “Publicity is not only a political antiseptic, but is the sure antidote for most, if not all, our governmental ills.” A justifiable inference from this declaration would be that counties are suffering from the lack of publicity. In the immunity from the restraint which such a purifying influence would supply the elementary human instincts of county officials has full sway—such instincts as the inspector had in mind when he said:

“The vile, pernicious, perverting, fee system beggars description, and my vocabulary is inadequate to describe its deleterious and baneful effects. It inculcates into the management of our jails greed for the Almighty Dollar; persons are arrested because of the dollar and shame to say, are frequently kept in captivity for months, in steel cages, for no other reason than the Almighty Dollar.”

The organization of the county for political purposes to secure the utmost obscurity and irresponsibility breaks the force of any humanitarian public opinion that might be developed for the betterment of the lot of the unfortunate. The same influences render the county practically uninhabitable for the expert administrator, who would be likely to direct popular attention to the evil conditions which we have described. His place has been preëmpted by the hanger-on and the wire-puller to whom charity means the dispensing of favors to “deserving” workers of all political faiths. In this sense the county is a very humane institution, and a very open-handed one. It serves well such local officials as the overseer of the poor in an up-state New York county who presented this remarkable annual report to his superior:

“I am a little late with my report. I hope you will excuse me and overlook the matter. Like last year, there are no county poor here; but if you will allow me $5.00 for keeping them off, you will oblige,

“Yours respectfully,
“——.”

This claim was paid and the poor were presumably “kept off” indefinitely.

There is not a little evidence to support the statement that many county officers believe that they have satisfied the requirements of humanity when they have taken care of their own personal wants. Such officers, and the system of which they are part, are very good—to themselves.

[4] Bailey B. Burritt, in Proceedings of the Second Conference for the Study and Reform of County Government, pp. 6, 7.

[5] First Conference for Better County Government, p. 22.

[6] Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May, 1913, p. 56.

[7] Op. cit., p. 168.

[8] The Treatment and Care of the Insane in Pennsylvania, pp. 68-69. Philadelphia, 1915.

[9] Leaflet. 1911.

[10] Proceedings of the Third Conference for the Study and Reform of County Government, pp. 6-7.

[11] Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May, 1913, p. 70.

CHAPTER X
ROADS AND BRIDGES

To the county in most of the states has also been committed from early times, the obligation to carry forward what is now generally recognized as one of the greatest of unifying, nationalizing, civilizing factors in this or any time—highways. Through these avenues of communication the people of the wilderness were to break their solitude, establish common understandings and give value to the products of the earth by creating markets for their distribution. Over the highways access was to be had with schools and churches.

From the colonial period and well down into the nineteenth century, the construction and maintenance of roads was, in diminishing degree, a private enterprise, operated by turnpike companies primarily for the benefit of their stock-holders rather than that of the public. Gradually road making came to be regarded as a public function, at first in respect to the repairs upon the private toll roads and then in original construction. In the year 1913 the amount which counties of the country spent upon their highways had mounted to $55,514,891.

To the fulfillment of this great function the county brought those weaknesses of governmental organization, that lack of equipment, that defective loyalty to the service of the whole people which have been described heretofore. The erection of a road system was a demand for broad, foreseeing knowledge and appreciation of the needs of the whole county, high technical skill in the art of road making and adequate financial arrangements. The county supplied none of these.

What the county did supply and how it supplied it may be worth the recital, even though in these days of the “good-roads” movement the state government is constantly stiffening its hold upon highway matters.

To begin with, the whole public road function is rooted, historically, in the tradition of the people’s infinite political versatility and infallibility. The true democrat of the nineteenth century never doubted his ability to select and control the human agents for executing a technical and difficult engineering problem, which has baffled the resources of modern specialists. And so, to this day, the management of road construction and care over a great portion of the country is entrusted to a farmer, a blacksmith, a plumber or some other species of layman who has sufficient popularity with his neighbors and the county chairman to get himself chosen as town supervisor. In some states the rôle of road manager is played by the somewhat better equipped county surveyor, who, however, like the supervisor, is picked in the majority of cases because of his vote-getting qualities rather than for any technical training.

Under these circumstances the roadmaster is apt to enter upon his public duties with a sense of his obligation not to the whole community and its ultimate interest, but to those articulate sections of the people who are most likely to make themselves felt on the next election day. As a certain highway engineer illustrated the situation: “Here’s $10,000 to spend on roads. Here also is Jeff Browning up on Nut Creek, who wants quite a little road work done. Of course, Jeff lives fifteen miles from the county seat, and there’s fifteen miles of bad roads between his place and town, but Jeff voted the whole settlement for me, and he has some idle teams, and we’ll just help him along by spending some money at his place.” It is one of the familiar processes of practical politics and the imagination should have no difficulty in picturing any number of equally accommodating transactions.

Quite as serious an aspect of road control directly by elective officers is that it gives too great and too convenient an opportunity for layman advice and prejudice to bear upon a technical problem. One curious idea which is prevalent in middle western rural districts is that a road, in order to be a road, must be on a section line, regardless of the contour of the land, the convenience of users of the highway or the character of the soil. The engineer above quoted tells of a very bad hill about two miles north of Poplar Bluff, Mo. “The grade,” says Mr. Edy, “must have been something like twelve per cent. in places. It was estimated that by going around this hill, a grade of six per cent. could be obtained, increasing the distance but slightly, and traversing almost worthless ground. The owner, however, would neither give nor sell a right of way, holding that unless the road were maintained ‘on the line’ it would not be a real road. Something like $400 was spent on this bill in an effort to make it passable, when half that amount would have made a permanent road in a new location.”

Of course, when the organization of the county gives to Jeff Browning and the philosopher of Poplar Bluff the predominating influence in road affairs, there can be nothing in the way of a county road policy or road plan that is based upon the economic and social needs of the whole people. The system enthrones petty rural sectionalism and narrowness and condones a form of graft which is without doubt as vicious in principle as the stealing of a street railway franchise. Where the township supervisor is the responsible official the case is at its worst for it means just so many more executive units to be watched, just so many more standards of road construction, just so many more independent road plans.

The “business” end of county road administration is often weighted down to earth with the same sublime faith in the wisdom of the average citizen. Rarely have counties maintained anything that approximated adequate records of cost or serviceability of their roads and bridges or data upon which they could construct a satisfactory policy of construction, if indeed their governing bodies have dreamed of the need or the value of such aids. Even of so highly developed a community as Monroe County, New York, in which the City of Rochester is situated, it could be said concerning the office of highway superintendent that “the only record now kept is a bill book in which are entered all claims against the county highway fund which are paid through the superintendent’s office, all payrolls and all claims for personal service.”[12]

Much the same lack of appreciation for facts was revealed in a cruder way in a grand jury investigation during 1912 of the methods of the Board of Commissioners in Darke County, Ohio, where it was discovered that minutes were rarely read and contracts were voted twenty at a time and sometimes without the formality of a vote, in direct violation of the law.

From another middle western state comes an illuminating description of the method of awarding bids on bridge construction: “Each competitor submitted his own drawings and an estimate to a board of commissioners, not one of whom had the least technical knowledge or practical experience, but was ‘led away’ generally by the size of the drawing and the accompanying estimate.

“The result was shoddy work, insufficient piers or abutments, piles not driven down to any safe and permanent depth and finally a bridge that was built for appearance, not durability nor permanency. Just as soon as we had a flood bringing down logs, stumps and trees, some of these would strike or swing against the piers and down came the structure, floating away or lodging in the stream, causing a jamb to accumulate, holding up the stream and overflowing land for miles.

“It took many years to get a system where an engineer designed a bridge with details of construction, steel or iron cylinders filled with concrete as piers, and a superintendent of construction who knew his business to take charge of the work.

“Thus we spent thousands of dollars for bridges to be erected simply to see them carried out; in one instance twice. But the cost and failure combined in time brought forth such protests that such a system would not be tolerated longer; but the waste was done and the money practically thrown away.

“In county road repair and construction we were no better. The district boss was elected politically, and of course he rewarded his commissioner friends by working the road fund. He dared not complain of short hours or little done or sitting by the road discussing how to ‘fix the election,’ and usually the work was done just before the nomination and election. The ‘dump of dirt’ was left in a pile, not even leveled; every team avoided it if possible, and when winter then came it was ‘slurry’ and mud. No ditches or outlets for same were made or cleaned out, and if any suggestion was made for improvement, you were told ‘it was good enough before you came and you can get out if you don’t want to stay.’”

In Polk County, Iowa, an investigation in 1912 disclosed the fact that the board of supervisors had paid out $100,000 for contracts without asking for bids. They never required plans or specifications of any bridge to be constructed. Bridges had been ordered without any idea of what they would cost. No guarantee bond was required and bridges were accepted without inspection. Certain companies had been favored to the exclusion of others and the result was that in many counties bridges were built at a cost fifty per cent. higher than their reasonable value.

To the rich opportunities for “turning an honest dollar” which lurked in such systems and in such an attitude on the part of the public officers, the “powers that prey” have been keenly alive. The tale that was told a few years ago, with a multitude of specifications, by a few enterprising farm journals in the Middle West, rivals, except in dramatic quality and the size of the sums involved, the characteristic falls from grace which have been heretofore associated with ward aldermen and legislators hailing from wicked urban districts. It was a serious indictment of county officialdom which is contained in a letter of the chairman of the Roads and Highways Committee of the lower house in Kansas, who wrote in 1913:

“I know there are comparatively few county commissioners who profit personally by the manipulations of the bridge companies but the representatives of the companies are shrewd men who understand thoroughly that the average county commissioner is very jealous of his bridge patronage, and brooks no interference with his handling of the bridge business with a free hand. Consequently the bridge men play this feature to the limit and to their own profit.”[13]

That Iowa was inoculated with the same germ is suggested by remarks of Alson Secor, the editor of Successful Farming:

“The bridge men are not depending upon a lobby at Des Moines, or any state capitol, to put through what they want, or to prevent legislation that will make bridge letting competitive. They work to elect or defeat supervisors. They finance state supervisors’ annual meetings and give the watchdogs of the public treasury that contains your tax money such a good time that the ‘boys’ fall under lasting obligations to the bridge companies.

“Bribe the lawmakers? Oh, no! You can’t say that. It isn’t a bribe to hand a man a line of soft talk, is it? It isn’t a bribe to give a county official a hilarious good time at a summer resort, is it? Or to pay his hotel bills when he attends the state meetings? No—a thousand times no—legally.

“But the bridge men get there just the same. They have for years prevented any legislation that would give them a dollar’s worth of bridge work for a dollar’s worth of taxes.”

So well satisfied were the favored bridge builders with the status quo in Nebraska in 1913 that they are said to have maintained at the state legislature a powerful lobby to oppose by corrupt methods a bill whose one purpose was to require bidders to furnish estimates on uniform blanks. The information thus obtained would have been placed on file at the state capitol and made available to all who might wish to compare the cost of construction in different counties—light would have been let into the operations of the counties in bridge-building matters.

It would seem, then, that the system did have much to do with waste of public funds and inefficiency of every sort and was the basis of a certain amount of corruption, in all the states mentioned. It was not all simply a matter of “good” men and “bad” men. But the breakdown of the county in highway affairs is fast becoming ancient history, not directly, through a process of regeneration, but through forces playing upon the county from without which we will again identify for the present simply as the “good-roads” movement, of which more hereafter.

[12] From an unpublished report of the Rochester Bureau of Municipal Research, 1915.

[13] Successful Farming, June, 1913.

CHAPTER XI
NULLIFICATION

Every now and then we shall have to remind ourselves that the county made the politician, rather than the other way round.

And the county in its turn, is pretty well rooted in the good graces of human nature. When American counties had been formed and their legal status as subordinates of the state had been established, the people throughout the length and breadth of each of the states were pretty much of one mind in the fundamental standards of personal conduct. A tradition of strict morality dominated New England. Its dominion was not seriously questioned. The South and the middle states may not have been so strict but they were homogeneous in their own brand of morality.

Then in due time two movements took place in the northern states. Just as the constitution follows the flag so the Puritan morality (more or less modulated and diluted) trailed the westward drift of New England population, first into New York, then into the Western Reserve and finally into the Middle West and Northwest. But another force contended for mastery with the New England influence. The growth of the cities and particularly of the factory centers was simultaneous with the great waves of immigration from central and southern Europe. With the new immigration came a conflicting standard of morality. The German and southern European immigrants particularly, brought with them liberal ideas of Sabbath observance. They also loved their beer and red wine. In time they upset the moral balance of the cities, coming into sharp collision with the New England (we might also say, American) conception of the Sabbath and with the total abstinence idea which began to get a firm foothold in the nineteenth century. This complex influence gave us the setting for at least one phase of that never-ending feud that rages between New York City and “up-state.” It pitted Chicago against rural Illinois. It made Cincinnati a more or less alien city in Ohio. It gave us a permanent body of citizens who resent having their conduct dictated (as they apparently view it) from above. Preponderantly foreign in their origin, they are loud in their proclamation of their rights as American citizens, while the New England element, still most influential on the whole in the rural districts, is properly horrified at the low estate of virtue in the cities.

It was inevitable that this clash of interests should be reflected in politics. Our curiously illogical state system lent itself most obligingly, if albeit rather ludicrously, to a compromise; the New England conscience should get the necessary laws and the “foreign element,” where its political force predominated, should control their enforcement! The state of Illinois has carried on its statute books a law requiring the closing of saloons on Sundays, which applies uniformly throughout the state. Never till recently was a serious attempt made to enforce it in the city of Chicago, which was quite in accordance with the modus vivendi. Then, in 1915, a new mayor took it into his head to close the saloons up tight. On a bright Sunday afternoon the populace, thirsty and indignant, turned out and demanded their American rights. The mayor’s attitude came from reading the law literally but without a due regard to the great body of voters who are “for the law but ‘agin’ its enforcement.”

The state system regularly provides against such mistakes of official judgment by carefully divorcing the duty to enforce from the incentive to enforce. The New York laws forbid the placing of wagers on horse races. They stand there presumably as a monument to the enlightened conscience of a majority of the people. They were not enacted as an expression of moral sentimentality to be ignored at will, but as an instruction for the governor, the administrative establishment of the state and the courts to carry out. The statute is of course obeyed in all counties where there are no race tracks and no facilities for placing bets! But in the other counties? The legislature has provided no means of execution other than the locally controlled peace officers, the sheriffs and the constables. These are the servants of the state, to be sure, and they are sworn to protect its laws. But in a more direct human way they are of the county, bound to the local hotel keepers, the local retail merchants and the jitney bus owners whose business thrives on the patronage of the race-track crowd. Local public opinion in the race-track district flouts the will of the people of the state and it says to the state, as President Jackson said to the Supreme Court, “You have made your decision; now enforce it.”

Only occasionally does moral sentiment run strong enough to force the governor to be in fact as well as in theory the real head of the state in the sense that he employs state instruments to enforce state desires. Such an incident occurred a few years ago when the governor of Indiana was compelled to order out the militia to enforce a law against race-track gambling because he had no power to compel the elective sheriff or other local officers to do their duty.

In practical politics this clash of moral standards produces not only the anomalous situation referred to but often the strictly administrative matter of law enforcement is consciously and designedly a political issue. The popular desire to graduate or temper the enforcement of the law is doubtless the real secret of interest which so often centers in the election of a district attorney. Shall we have a “liberal” administration or shall we “clap on the lid,” that is about the form the question takes—euphony for: “Shall the prosecutor shut his eyes and ignore the law, or shall he obey it according to his official oath?” The liberal candidate goes before the people with promises to go easy and the strict morality candidate to make the way of the transgressor hard.

Which is right? For the present it matters little. It remains simply to point out that since the organization of the state and county provides no organ of expression for local policy, the people in their infinite capacity to adapt themselves to a hard condition proceed to make a policy-determining body out of a strictly administrative officer, like the district attorney or the sheriff.

Nullification shows itself also in the administration of the tax law. Most of the states derive a portion of their revenues from the general property tax. But the power of taxation lies in the legislature and no state has its own local agents directly and fully responsible to a central authority for fixing the valuations upon which the levy is based. The county (except where state revenues are derived from distinct sources) is required to contribute its proportionate share to the central treasury and is left to do the right thing by the state, with such supervision as will be hereafter noted. The people of the county are allowed to select their own assessors, on the theory that a man on the ground knows valuations better than any outside impartial person and that no one is more competent to select such a man than his own neighbors.

And so it happens, just as in the case of the sheriffs, that the local tax officers are confronted with conflicting obligations. They must take their choice, on the one hand, between strict observance of the law and unpopularity, with the probable loss of their jobs at the end of their term, and popularity with prospects of possible political advancement and a more or less assured living, on the other. Inasmuch as there is never any question as to which of these courses is the more practical and immediately profitable, the tax assessors of the county invariably find it infinitely to their personal advantage to serve the locality that pays their salaries. Assessors in the sister counties do likewise; with the ultimate result that general competition arises among the counties as to which shall value property lowest and thus pay the smallest proportion of the state’s tax. The system is ideally designed to reward dishonesty and perjury and punish faithful obedience to the law. For, as a former New York State Tax Commissioner has said, “Under assessment is the rule throughout the state, and in nearly all the tax districts intentionally and purposely so.” The range of these assessments is well known to be anywhere between twenty-five and ninety per cent. of the full value of the property. And the assessors “make their own laws as to the basis of assessing property, in deliberate violation of the statutes and then proceed to make oath to the assessment rule that they have assessed all property at its full value.” That what is true of New York is equally true of most other states where an analogous system prevails, is the testimony of tax authorities.

These frailties of human nature the states have weakly connived at by the provisions they have made for equalization of assessments. It is the old story of reform via complication and, as one county attorney in New York has testified, “equalization in this state is an abomination, a joke, a cover for deals and trades, a means of purchase and sale, in its results most unfair and unjust, based on the assumption of accomplished perjury, in itself a chief cause of the perjury.” A Missouri authority corroborates by remarking:

“The county board of equalization ... does little to improve the situation as it is affected by the same conditions which influence the acts of the assessor. Much the same is true of the state board of equalization which consists of the Governor, Secretary of State, State Auditor, State Treasurer and Attorney-General. This board has authority to equalize assessments among the counties, but not among different persons or property within the county. The officials who make up this board have neither the time, information nor powers to adequately correct the evils. Political considerations also affect the solution of the problems.”

But the way to a sincere and logical system is not easy. Popular sentiment seems to favor the status quo. For the first time in the history of this country, Governor Cox of Ohio in 1913 persuaded the legislature to establish a unified plan of organization for local assessment. Inasmuch as taxation is the prerogative of the state government, he proposed a system of tax assessment which would have made this idea an actual as well as a legal fact. The law would have abolished the locally elected assessor in the counties. Full control would have been placed in the hands of the state government, since the Governor would appoint the local officials. There would probably, in the nature of things, have been an end to log-rolling and to competition between the counties to “beat” the state. The law was passed, but it was so unpopular that Governor Cox’s opponent in the succeeding election used it for political capital. One of the earliest and proudest achievements of his administration was the repeal of this law.

And so our old friend the “average citizen” finds it often acceptable to have a county government that is not built in strict conformance with logic. It is a complicated mechanism to be sure, but what matter, if he can employ a chauffeur to run it? To meet just such specific demands as this the professional politician and his illogical system have arisen and continue to exist.

CHAPTER XII
STATE MEDDLING

Now the other side of the story.

While the county nonchalantly and with seeming impunity has been breaking all the inconvenient statutes, the state in its own peculiar way has been working out a method of “taking it out” of the county for the indignities of nullification. The state’s “big stick” (which it does not always employ to a public purpose) is a policy of meddlesomeness which expresses itself through special legislation. Of which, more herewith.

In times gone by, when counties were almost universally located in the open country, and before the rush for the cities had set apart centers of population which developed their special mechanism of local government, it was doubtless appropriate that constitutions should impose upon legislature the duty to legislate “uniformly” for all counties, even to the point of anticipating some of their more detailed needs.

Practically every state legislature was given a considerable, if not complete, power to bend the county to its will in every particular of government. In the logic of the law, the county was a subdivision of the state before it was an organ of strictly local government. The legislature might erect new counties or change boundary lines at will, with the one limitation in some states that its decision is subject to a local referendum. It might also erect new county offices in addition to those mentioned in the constitution and fix their powers and duties. Long ago it became the accepted principle of law that local authorities might exercise only such powers as were specifically conferred upon them.

The theory was, apparently, that since counties exist to execute the will of the whole state and have the same general duties to perform, all counties can and must perform them in the same manner. It is a plausible theory. If a county is to administer justice it needs a judge, a sheriff, a prosecutor and a court clerk. And each of these officers in the several counties should follow as closely as possible an identical or similar procedure. Every county must have a fiscal agency, a governing board, and be required to observe certain minimum standards in the handling of the funds entrusted to its care.

Uniformity up to this point is doubtless not burdensome but helpful. But by carrying a good idea too far the legislatures have often gone beyond the point of setting up a general organization and procedure and have descended into minor details which would usually best be determined in the light of the more perfect knowledge of local conditions which the people of the locality may be expected to possess.

The New York legislature, for instance, has accepted the inertia of long-standing custom and permitted to stand on the statutes a county law under which the boards of supervisors in all counties, except those of New York City, are organized in precisely the same manner. No regard for the far-reaching historic shifts of population; no thought as to how deeply the social and political unity of a particular county may have been shattered by the growth of great cities in the midst of apple orchards or grain fields. The law has passively assumed that voters are voters (just as “business is business” and “pigs is pigs”) whether they reside in a crowded city or sparsely settled countryside where everybody knows everybody else’s business and has plenty of time to play politics.

And so it turns out that Erie County, containing the city of Buffalo, with its half million inhabitants surrounded by a farming district, is equipped with the same general form of government as the rough and sparsely settled counties of Warren and Essex in the Adirondacks.

In other states, for Buffalo substitute Cleveland, or Chicago or Milwaukee—great cities unequally yoked with an agricultural population of divergent interests.

It is inevitable under the circumstances that the states through their legislatures should do a good deal of polite nullifying on their own account. The provisions of the constitutions relating to legislative powers over counties, instead of being strictly construed have ingeniously circumvented. What some legislatures could do in defiance of good political science but yet without legal evasion the California, New Jersey and other legislatures have accomplished by stretching the meaning “general” or “uniform.”

Take the California practice. In the words of the constitution the legislature is required to establish “a system of county government which shall be uniform throughout the state.” But it happens that these counties range in population from a few hundred to over half a million, and in area from 755 to 23,000 square miles. Some are strictly rural, while, at the other extreme, is one geographically identical with the city of San Francisco. All sorts of combinations of urban and rural conditions intervene. Some of the territory is traversed by steam railroads and trolley lines and some of it is inaccessible to a stage coach. But all of it is “uniformly” governed. Inasmuch as the legislature never could bring itself to withhold its hand from the minute details of county business, it had to find a way to “beat” the constitution. It placed each of the fifty-six counties in a separate class, and passed fifty-six “general” laws, each applying in fact to a single county, but not mentioning the county by name!

In Illinois the habit of special legislation has led the Bureau of Public Efficiency to remark that: “The General Assembly of Illinois might with propriety be added to the list of nineteen local governing bodies of Cook County, for it is continually interfering in an arbitrary manner in matters of local administration.”

New Jersey has sinned quite as grievously and its courts have consistently upheld the act even against a provision of the constitution which expressly prohibits the legislature from “regulating the internal affairs of towns and counties.”

But lest the full import of these statements should be lost, the following titles of special county bills in a single session of a New York legislature, are cited in evidence:

Too often the motive of the legislators has not been to make the county the state’s more obedient servant, but to “bleed” it to the utmost for political purposes. Back of the real difficulties of adjusting the state’s responsibilities to the idea of local control over administrative details, is too evident the suspicion that the political machine needs the county very much “in its business.”

For this reason, doubtless, special legislation affecting counties is so often inseparably associated with the forcible opening of the county treasury. New York City in recent years has suffered grievously from mandatory salary increases, imposed in many cases by a party of the opposite political faith from the one in control over the local budget. Thus in 1915 out of a total budget allowance of $7,003,716.82 for county purposes, the sum of $4,858,773.47 or 69.1 per cent. represented mandatory appropriations which could not be increased or diminished by the local budget makers either because the exact amount was fixed by law or because the power of fixation was conferred upon other officers than the appropriating body of the city. Many of the measures in question dealt with the salaries of clerks, stenographers and messengers. Of the total allowance in the same year for personal services (salaries, etc.) of $5,809,481.75, 78 per cent. or $4,576,985.75 was beyond local control. While by far the greater proportion of these sums were just and necessary, the margin of waste which represented one hundred per cent. politics, was, without a doubt, exceedingly large.

Nor have the legislatures been led to take this course for reasons of public economy. In thus appropriating other people’s money according to its professedly superior knowledge of the state’s needs, it does not often appear to give heed to standards of experience or of service rendered. Often it is but the old story of the influences back of the bill with this title: “An Act, providing for the appointment by the sheriff of —— County, of an undersheriff, fireman and court officers, and for their compensation and duties.” When the truth came out it appeared that the sheriff and the board of supervisors were of opposite parties. The sheriff (whether rightly or wrongly) was not to be put aside. He simply appealed over the heads of his “superiors” to a higher authority for what he wanted—and got it. The people had elected a Board of Supervisors, to manage the county finances, but at the moment when this body might have effected a just economy, it was forcibly stripped of their powers.

Theoretically the legislature in the case cited intervened, but what probably happened was that someone saw the representative in the legislature from the county in question and he “fixed” it with the proper committee. The speaker let the bill go through on the floor of the legislature.

From the standpoint of the local politician or petty officeholder who is looking for special privilege, via the back-door method, and of the home legislator who does the “fixing,” special legislation is thus doubtless a benevolent privilege which enables men to put various local people in their debt for future purposes. For the “organization” of the dominant party, the power to give to or withhold from the local municipalities is often not the least important element of its power.

As for the county, for its sins of nullification it would seem to be appropriately penalized, particularly if it belongs in the metropolitan class. It has been placed under a sort of patriarchal discipline, robbed of much of its individuality and initiative; its responsible officers subjected to humiliation from subordinates; its resources diverted to partisan uses.

CHAPTER XIII
STATE GUIDANCE

At this point the indictment of the county ceases. It is not an altogether hopeless situation. The very thoroughness of the county’s failure is the chief promise of ultimate redemption.

Not because the county is constructed on an unsound political theory, not because it has shocked the sense of humanity, but because of its riotous misuse of public funds, it has begun to attract the attention of higher authorities.

Where does the county’s money go? It has been strongly intimated in previous chapters that the citizens of the county and sometimes even the county officers know little and care less. Is it economically run? No one can easily tell, without knowing what other county governments are costing, service for service and unit for unit. And no one can make such a comparison between counties unless they have some common basis of understanding. To establish standards in the use of terms, to make in other words, each county tell its financial story in a language understood throughout the state, to bring the information from the various counties together for comparison, to insist upon a sufficiently detailed description of financial activities, is the object of uniform reporting.

And who can force such a coming together for a common understanding other than the state itself?

Among the states where county government is of appreciable importance, Ohio was the pioneer in the direction indicated by this suggestion. The law enacted in that state in 1902 approached the county problem with the conviction that what was needed above all else was more light—in an administrative sense; that when the shortcomings of county government could be reduced to statistics and comparisons (invidious if necessary) could be made between various units, then some real improvements might be reasonably expected. Provision was made in the enactment for a state Bureau of Inspection and Supervision of Public Offices which should install a uniform system of public accounting, auditing and reporting in every office in the state. A corps of field agents known as state examiners were employed on a civil service basis to make personal examinations in each of the taxing districts. The findings of the examiners are published, and if money is due the county the enforcement of the law is left first to the county prosecuting attorney and then to the attorney general.

New York followed the lead of Ohio by passing in 1905 a law which requires counties, villages and cities, to report annually to the comptroller on forms prescribed by him.

“Indiana and Ohio,” says Professor John A. Boyle,[14] “has gone into the science and art of uniform accounting very seriously and very effectively. The Indiana law (1909, ch. 55, amended March 3, 1911), creates a Department of Inspection and Supervision of Public Offices having jurisdiction over every public office in the state. The administration of the law was entrusted at the outset to one state examiner, two deputies, one clerk, and fifty-two field agents working on a civil service basis. Uniform accounting is prescribed and installed. Comparative statistics are compiled by the state examiner and published annually, so that the fruits of this department are available to the public.”

Wyoming has a fair system of audit.

The North Dakota law, while it requires the state examiner “to prescribe and enforce correct methods,” does not call for a uniform system. Massachusetts, Kansas, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Florida, Tennessee, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Washington, Minnesota, West Virginia, Louisiana, California and Michigan have more or less complete systems of state financial supervision. The “black sheep” among the states in this respect are Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia.

Now for the results of this supervision.

Professor Boyle has summed up the sort of assistance that the state bureaus of accounting have been able to give. One instance of such help is that where county officers had been accustomed in the past to take long and expensive junkets to inspect public buildings, expert advice under the new system has been rendered to them in much cheaper form through the investigators of the state. Examiners have also been able to point out to county officers many deviations from the letter of the law, the strict compliance with which is of the most vital importance in the performance of certain county functions, such as taxation. In a similar way they have checked up illegal charges against the county, inadequate audit (or no audit at all), instances of additional compensation (under various guises) for personal service, illegal temporary loans and misapplication of funds.

It will at once be seen that the mere possibility of a state examiner’s visit will have an admonitory effect which in itself will often be sufficient to keep an official in the straight and narrow path. The county, in conforming to the reporting requirements, derives a local benefit wholly apart from any obligation to the state. Upon the basis of a sound and permanent system of accounting the local officers are in a position accurately to inform the county of their doings and make comparison of a financial transaction of one year with those of previous years. Herein is one foundation stone of a scientific budget.

Under a complete system of state regulation not only are the forms and standards of uniform accounting established, but a staff of expert examiners is created to determine by periodical investigation, whether or not these standards are lived up to.

The remarkable conditions preceding the establishment of the Ohio Bureau and the important services which it has rendered the state, are revealed in the following summary[15] of its findings in counties during the first ten years of its existence.

STATEMENT OF FINDINGS TO NOVEMBER 15, 1912

COUNTIES

Year Findings
for Recovery 		Illegal
Payments 		Unclaimed
Moneys 		Total
Illegal 		Returns
1903 $50,268.93 $18,808.91 $807.92 $69,884.76 $10,741.93
1904 57,805.54 2,504.41 10,339.95 70,649.90 2,222.31
1905 246,280.58 7,421.87 25,389.52 279,091.97 24,847.83
1906 295,082.80 14,227.52 5,218.21 314,528.53 232,156.78
1907 646,397.50 115,906.91 18,049.13 780,353.54 322,911.08
1908 103,764.26 43,333.31 9,829.15 156,928.92 41,171.53
1909 410,282.51 320,137.17 23,219.42 753,639.10 66,219.91
1910 146,024.04 106,410.00 22,241.18 274,675.22 24,438.36
1911 233,547.24 129,007.02 7,921.90 370,476.16 37,735.34
1912 112,926.80 No report 118.26 113,045.06 96,015.16
Ttls $2,302,379.30 $757,759.32 $123,134.54 $3,183,273.16 $858,460.23