[Sidenote: Municipal officers in Boston.] There are three street commissioners with power to lay out streets and assess damages thereby occasioned. These are elected by the people. The following officers are appointed by the mayor, with the concurrence of the aldermen: a superintendent of streets, an inspector of buildings, three commissioners each for the fire and health departments, four overseers of the poor, besides a board of nine directors for the management of almshouses, houses of correction, lunatic hospital, etc.; a city hospital board of five members, five trustees of the public library, three commissioners each for parks and water-works; five chief assessors, to estimate the value of property and assess city, county, and state taxes; a city collector, a superintendent of public buildings, five trustees of Mount Hope Cemetery, six sinking fund commissioners, two record commissioners, three registrars of voters, a registrar of births, deaths, and marriages, a city treasurer, city auditor, city solicitor, corporation counsel, city architect, city surveyor, superintendent of Faneuil Hall Market, superintendent of street lights, superintendent of sewers, superintendent of printing, superintendent of bridges, five directors of ferries, harbour master and ten assistants, water registrar, inspector of provisions, inspector of milk and vinegar, a sealer and four deputy sealers of weights and measures, an inspector of lime, three inspectors of petroleum, fifteen inspectors of pressed hay, a culler of hoops and staves, three fence-viewers, ten field-drivers and pound-keepers, three surveyors of marble, nine superintendents of hay scales, four measurers of upper leather, fifteen measurers of wood and bark, twenty measurers of grain, three weighers of beef, thirty-eight weighers of coal, five weighers of boilers and heavy machinery, four weighers of ballast and lighters, ninety-two undertakers, 150 constables, 968 election officers and their deputies. A few of these officials serve without pay, some are paid by salaries fixed by the council, some by fees. Besides these there is a clerk of the common council elected by that body, and also the city clerk, city messenger, and clerk of committees, in whose election both branches of the city council concur. The school committee, of twenty-four members, elected by the people, is distinct from the rest of the city government, and so is the board of police, composed of three commissioners appointed by the state executive.[11]
[Footnote 11: Bugbee, "The City Government of Boston," J.H.U.
Studies, V., iii.]
[Sidenote: How city government comes to be a mystery.] This long list may serve to give some idea of the mere quantity of administrative work required in a large city. Obviously under such circumstances city government must become more or less of a mystery to the great mass of citizens. They cannot watch its operations as the inhabitants of a small village can watch the proceedings of their township and county governments. Much work must go on which cannot even be intelligently criticised without such special knowledge as it would be idle to expect in the average voter, or perhaps in any voter. It becomes exceedingly difficult for the taxpayer to understand just what his money goes for, or how far the city expenses might reasonably be reduced; and it becomes correspondingly easy for municipal corruption to start and acquire a considerable headway before it can be detected and checked.
[Sidenote: In some respects it is more of a mystery that state and national government.] In some respects city government is harder to watch intelligently than the government of the state or of the nation. For these wider governments are to some extent limited to work of general supervision. As compared with the city, they are more concerned with the establishment and enforcement of certain general principles, and less with the administration of endlessly complicated details. I do not mean to be understood as saying that there is not plenty of intricate detail about state and national governments. I am only comparing one thing with another, and it seems to me that one chief difficulty with city government is the bewildering vastness and multifariousness of the details with which it is concerned. The modern city has come to be a huge corporation for carrying on a huge business with many branches, most of which call for special aptitude and training.
[Sidenote: The mayor at first had too little power.] As these points have gradually forced themselves upon public attention there has been a tendency in many of our large cities toward remodeling their governments on new principles. The most noticeable feature of this tendency is the increase in the powers of the mayor.
A hundred years ago our legislators and constitution-makers were much afraid of what was called the "one-man power." In nearly all the colonies a chronic quarrel had been kept up between the governors appointed by the king and the legislators elected by the people, and this had made the "one-man power" very unpopular. Besides, it was something that had been unpopular in ancient Greece and Rome, and it was thought to be essentially unrepublican in principle. Accordingly our great grandfathers preferred to entrust executive powers to committees rather than to single individuals; and when they assigned an important office to an individual they usually took pains to curtail its power and influence. This disposition was visible in our early attempts to organize city governments like little republics. First, in the board of aldermen and the common council we had a two-chambered legislature. Then, lest the mayor should become dangerous, the veto power was at first generally withheld from him, and his appointments of executive officers needed to be confirmed by at least one branch of the city council. These executive officers, moreover, as already observed, were subject to more or less control or oversight from committees of the city council.
[Sidenote: Scattering and weakening of responsibility.] Now this system, in depriving the mayor of power, deprived him of responsibility, and left the responsibility nowhere in particular. In making appointments the mayor and council would come to some sort of compromise with each other and exchange favours. Perhaps for private reasons incompetent or dishonest officers would get appointed, and if the citizens ventured to complain the mayor would say that he appointed as good men as the council could be induced to confirm, and the council would declare their willingness to confirm good appointments if the mayor could only be persuaded to make them.
[Sidenote: Committees inefficient for executive purposes.] Then the want of subordination of the different executive departments made it impossible to secure unity of administration or to carry out any consistent and generally intelligible policy. Between the various executive officers and visiting committees there was apt to be a more or less extensive interchange of favours, or what is called "log-rolling;" and sums of money would be voted by the council only thus to leak away in undertakings the propriety or necessity of which was perhaps hard to determine. There was no responsible head who could be quickly and sharply called to account. Each official's hands were so tied that whatever went wrong he could declare that it was not his fault. The confusion was enhanced by the practice of giving executive work to committees or boards instead of single officers. Benjamin Franklin used to say, if you wish to be sure that a thing is done, go and do it 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.]