reduce the number of councilmen, if necessary, adjust the method of representation, introduce needed electoral and primary reform, establish responsibility by means of uniform municipal accounting and publicity of proceedings, and we ask the gentlemen in all earnestness why American city councils will not take on new life just as the city councils of every other country have done in the past.

The two great problems of American city government are:  first, administration; secondly, municipal home rule.  The solution of both depends upon the existence of two separately constituted departments of government.  This principle is being emphasized by the leading scholars of political science, as illustrated by the program of the National Municipal League.  In fact, Honorable Judges, every deep-seated reform in our large cities for the past quarter of a century has tended toward this cardinal doctrine of municipal success.  The Ohio Municipal Code Commission, after two years of careful study and observation, presented a bill based upon the principles which we defend tonight, namely, a separation of administration from legislation, and secondly, municipal home rule.

In direct opposition to this, the gentlemen present and advocate as a permanent scheme for the organization of American cities, both large and small, a commission form, a quasi-legislative and administrative board patterned to give mediocrity in the performance of both functions, success in neither; a form which destroys forever the possibility of developing an efficient executive cabinet and is entirely out of harmony with the advancing idea of municipal home rule.

Mr. George Luxford, the third speaker on the Affirmative, said: 

It has been made very clear by my colleagues that the present shameful condition of many of our American cities is due in large measure to the peculiar form of the government patterned after a scheme which is adapted to a sovereign government like the state or nation.  The Negative demand an isolation which history shows, so far as our American cities are concerned, leads to a complete confusion of functions, with a consequent loss of responsibility.  Knowing the inadequacy of the scheme they then demanded municipal home rule; but we have shown that the Affirmative are thoroughly committed to municipal home rule which under the commission form alone can be safely intrusted to cities.  State interference in city government is the child of the form of government for which our friends of the Negative are sponsors.  Thus far the gentlemen have failed to disprove the points which we have presented that the theory of checks and balances when applied to American cities has failed; that the plan of concentrating municipal authority under one head as advocated by the commission plan is in complete harmony with modern industrial and social development, and that the plan is superior from a legislative standpoint.