not seem to work well.  New York and Philadelphia seem to have heard as many complaints in the nineteenth century as in the eighteenth, and the same kind of complaints,—­of excessive taxation, public money wasted or embezzled, ill-paved and dirty streets, inefficient police, and so on to the end of the chapter.  In most of our large cities similar evils have been witnessed, and in too many of the smaller ones the trouble seems to be the same in kind, only less in degree.  Our republican government, which, after making all due allowances, seems to work remarkably well in rural districts, and in the states, and in the nation, has certainly been far less successful as applied to cities.  Accordingly our cities have come to furnish topics for reflection to which writers and orators fond of boasting the unapproachable excellence of American institutions do not like to allude.  Fifty years ago we were wont to speak of civil government in the United States as if it had dropped from heaven or had been specially created by some kind of miracle upon American soil; and we were apt to think that in mere republican forms there was some kind of mystic virtue which made them a panacea for all political evils.  Our later experience with cities has rudely disturbed this too confident frame of mind.  It has furnished facts which do not seem to fit our self-complacent theory, so that now our writers and speakers are inclined to vent their spleen upon the unhappy cities, perhaps too unreservedly.  We hear them called “foul sinks of corruption” and “plague spots on our body politic.”  Yet in all probability our cities are destined to increase in number and to grow larger and larger; so that perhaps it is just as well to consider them calmly, as presenting problems which had not been thought of when our general theory of government was first worked out a hundred years ago, but which, after we have been sufficiently taught by experience, we may hope to succeed in solving, just as we have heretofore succeeded in other things.  A general discussion of the subject does not fall within the province of this brief historical sketch.  But our account would be very incomplete if we were to stop short of mentioning some of the recent attempts that have been made toward reconstructing our theories of city government and improving its practical working.  And first, let us point out a few of the peculiar difficulties of the problem, that we may see why we might have been expected, up to the present time, to have been less successful in managing our great cities than in managing our rural communities, and our states, and our nation.