In proposing such a policy the governor would be held to a high sense of responsibility.  He could not escape from the penalties of an unwise, an ill-drawn, or a foolhardy legislative proposal.  At the same time he would be obliged constantly to meet severe criticism both as to the principle and details of his measures on the part of the legislative council.  Such criticism would fasten upon any weakness and would sufficiently protect the public against the submission of unnecessary, foolish, or dangerous legislative proposals.

I am aware, of course, that the plan of legislative organization, vaguely sketched above, will seem to be most dubious to the great majority of Americans, intelligently interested in political matters; but before absolutely condemning these suggestions as wild or dangerous, the reader should consider the spirit in which and the purpose for which they are made.  My intention has not been to prepare a detailed plan of local governmental organization and to stamp it as the only one, which is correct in principle and coherent in detail.  In a sense I care nothing about the precise suggestions submitted in the preceding paragraphs.  They are offered, not as a definite plan of local political organization, but as the illustration of a principle.  The principle is that both power and responsibility in affairs of local government should be peculiarly concentrated.  It cannot be concentrated without some simplification of machinery and without giving either the legislature or the executive a dominant authority.  In the foregoing plan the executive has been made dominant, because as a matter of fact recent political experience has conclusively proved that the executives, elected by the whole constituency, are much more representative of public opinion than are the delegates of petty districts.  One hundred district agents represent only one hundred districts and not the whole state, or the state in so far as it is whole.  In the light of current American political realities the executive deserves the greater share of responsibility and power; and that is why the proposal is made to bestow it on him.  The other details of the foregoing plan have been proposed in a similar spirit.  They are innovations; but they are innovations which may naturally (and perhaps should) result from certain living practices and movements in American local politics.  They merely constitute an attempt to give those ideas and practices candid recognition.  No such reorganization may ever be reached in American local government; and I may have made essential mistakes in estimating the real force of certain current practices and the real value of certain remedial expedients.  But on two points the argument admits of no concession.  Any practical scheme of local institutional reform must be based on the principle of more concentrated responsibility and power, and it must be reached by successive experimental attempts to give a more consistent and efficient form to actual American political practices.