So, about twenty years ago, all across the country went the cry, “Get a good mayor, and give him a free hand.”  That is the way our great industries are conducted:  a wise captain of industry is secured and given full control.  Being a practical people, and imagining ourselves to be much more practical than really we are, we said, let us conduct our city business in the same way.  Why not?  Plato showed long ago that you can get the best government in the shortest time by getting a good tyrant, and giving him a free hand.

There arc just two objections.  The first is incidental:  it is exceedingly difficult to keep your tyrant good.  Arbitrary authority over one’s fellows is about the most corrupting influence known to man.  No one is great and good enough to be entrusted with it.  Responsible power sobers and educates, irresponsible power corrupts.  Nevertheless we pay the price of this error and learn the lesson.

The other objection is more significant.  It is the effect on the rank and file of the citizenship, for the meaning of democracy is not immediate results in government, but the education of the citizen, and that education can come only by fulfilling the functions of citizenship.  Thus it is better to be the free citizen of a democracy, with all the waste and temporary inefficiency democracy involves, than to be the inert slave of the most perfect paternal despotism ever devised by man.  Thus the movement away from democratic city government is gravely to be questioned, no matter what economic results it secures.

The same argument applies to more recent changes, as the commission form of city government.  As in the previous case, reacting upon the scandalous situation, we said, “Let us choose the three to five best men in the community, and let them run the city’s business for us.”  Nearly every time this change has been made, the result has been an immediate cleaning up of the city government; but why?  Chiefly because “a new broom sweeps clean,”—­not so much for the reason that it is new, as because you are interested in the instrument.  You can get a dirty room remarkably clean with an old broom, if you will sweep hard enough.  The cleaning up is due, not primarily to the instrument, but to the hand that wields it.

To speak less figuratively:  the cleaning up of the city government with the inauguration of the commission system, came because the change was made by an awakening of the good people of the community.  Good people have a habit, however, of going to sleep in an astoundingly short time; but the gang never sleeps.  Now suppose, while the good people are dozing in semi-somnolence, assured that the new broom will sweep of itself, the gang gets together and elects the three to five worst gangsters in the city to be the commission?  Is it not evident that the very added efficiency of the instrument means greater graft and corruption?

Equally the argument applies to the most recent device suggested—­the city manager plan.  As we have largely taken our schools out of politics, and have a non-partisan educational expert as superintendent, so it is suggested we should conduct our city business.  Again, suppose the gang appoints the city manager:  he will be an expert in graft, rather than in government.