nations; three times that of the Argentine Republic; four times that of Sweden and Norway combined.  Honorable Judges, the American people are too business-like ever to place the entire raising, appropriating, and extending of such vast sums of money, or the half, or the quarter, or the tenth of such, in the hands of five men without the adequate check and safeguard of some supervising and reviewing body, call it congress, legislature, or council.

The gentlemen condemn divisions of powers because the city’s functions are of such a mixed nature and no strict line of separation can be drawn.  Granted.  We have emphasized repeatedly that we are not standing for division of powers; we are standing for separately constituted bodies, which shall co-operate.  We are defending no system of disconnected committees which the gentlemen have spent a whole speech in attacking, and we have shown, furthermore, that the evils are only augmented by going to the other extreme and completely confusing the functions in one small body.  The gentlemen see no difference between principles of government and the form or mechanism which embodies, adequately or inadequately, those principles.  They forget that the National Municipal League debated for three years over detail of form, never once disagreeing as to the essential principle of distinct bodies for legislation and administration.  They forget that the model charter, which is efficient because it has a proper co-ordination of departments, is based upon the same principle of separately constituted bodies as the old board system with its disconnected departments and complicated machinery.  Because the machinery has been inadequate, owing to causes which the gentlemen have ignored, they would abolish the working principle which is proved correct in every instance of successful city organization, wherever found.

Just a word on this over-worked argument of centering responsibility.  Accountability means that a man charged with the performance of a task shall be held undividedly responsible for it.  Now the commissioners collectively legislate.  They can not do this without constantly and seriously intruding upon the work of the several departments.  The moment this is done, responsibility is diffused.  The Hume incident, mentioned by my colleague, is abundant illustration of the way responsibility is fixed under a commission form.  Says Professor F.I.  Herriot, head of the department of political science in Drake University and statistician of the Iowa board of control:  “A commission form cuts at the very roots of official accountability and responsibility and, strange enough, it is because its friends believe that it enhances fixing of responsibility that they propose it.”  This from a scholar who has watched the plan in operation.  A commission form does not fix responsibility, but even granting for the sake of argument that it does, are we to sacrifice representative government for the