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.”