The home-rule movement, if it may so be indicated, is practical evidence that people are regarding counties as something more than mere geographical expressions. Counties are thinking units. They are capable of framing local policies. Therefore they would extend their opportunities to think and to express themselves.
This idea seems to be at the bottom of the local option policy of the organized anti-liquor forces throughout a great portion of the country. Shrewd tactics, of course, has a good deal to do with it, for county and other forms of local option are but the thin side of a wedge to state-wide and even nation-wide prohibition. But for the present at least, organizations like the Anti-Saloon League realize that counties are very handy and convenient units of public sentiment and have been instrumental in securing county option laws in many states, including Idaho, Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Oregon, Texas. Incidentally, the county option plan makes the public policy district in liquor matters coincide with districts for enforcement, thus minimizing the danger of nullification.
CHAPTER XVI
CONSOLIDATION
The battle cry of local freedom comes up loudest from urban centers. The simple reason is that the counties were devised originally for communities in a state of nature—a few people, widely scattered, all but oblivious to the existence or need of government. City communities on the other hand are highly complex, individualized, differentiated units. Accordingly, their governmental garments must be custom-made.
City governments indeed were instituted partly to escape the strait-jacket inflexibility of the counties. Gradually, as we have seen, they elbowed the county governments into a dark corner, to the infinite debasement of the sheriff, the coroner, the poor master and the tax collector and other typical accessories of the county.
But almost everywhere, at some point short of full county annihilation, the pressure of the city stopped. Perhaps it was the politicians who intervened, to save “the boys” at the court house; or perhaps it was the feeling that seems to have settled down upon our political thinking, that counties, like death and taxes, have to be.
Within very recent years, bold spirits in some of the metropolitan centers have begun to feel that the county, in their particular communities, was a public nuisance and have been “going” for it. Thus the New York Times, when the New York Constitutional Convention was in session in 1915, delivered not a few strokes for a proposition to abolish existing boundaries of the sixty-one counties and substitute therefor eight administrative districts. Cleveland, Ohio, reformers would like to have that city divorce itself from the rural part of Cuyahoga County. In Rochester, a recent survey has suggested a similar course with reference to Monroe County. Studies have also been made recently (1916) by the City Club of Milwaukee. A member of the city commission in Jersey City has recently caused to be passed in the legislature a bill providing for a vote on consolidation of municipalities in Hudson County on a sort of borough plan. In Cincinnati the question of consolidation of the city with Hamilton County was recently opened, apparently for the first time, in newspaper discussions. In the 1916 New York legislature there was under discussion a bill extending control of the board of estimate and apportionment in New York City over the employees of the five counties within the city. This was in line with a recent report by the chamberlain and the commissioner of accounts of New York City submitted to the Constitutional Convention, which pointed out the advantages of the abolition of counties in New York City and the transfer of their functions to the control of the city authorities. St. Louis City actually accomplished the fact in 1876 when it separated from St. Louis County. Baltimore and a number of Virginia cities have long been separated (for historical rather than reformatory reasons, however,) from the surrounding rural or suburban territory.
In practice, the process of relocation of county boundary lines is very much like the reversing of a long series of court decisions. Local tradition and the gradual crystallizing of the interests of local politicians militate powerfully to maintain the status quo. And, yet, for all that, the shifting of boundary lines must inevitably come, if local governments are to meet their obligations.
Just where and by what criteria the new lines are to be laid is no easy question to decide; our metropolitan centers are of such various origins and in such differing degrees of development. The committee on City-County Consolidation of the National Municipal League in a preliminary report rendered in 1916 seeks to classify the urban communities in this fashion: