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.]