go to a record room and study a set of curves showing, for instance, the total number of men in the employ of the city year after year under different administrations. He would be able to see over a period of years the number of men in each city department such as fire, police, street-cleaning, etc., together with the average rate of pay. He would also have complete information over a long series of years regarding taxable property in the city, tax rates, total population, death rates, etc. All this information would be available instantly, not only to the mayor but to each member of the council, who might apply to the record department very much as he would apply to any good reference library when in search of information. The only rule necessary would be that no curve cards should leave the room. To safeguard information files to which numerous councilmen have access, it would be wise to use only blue prints in the open files, keeping the original cards in separate locked files, available only to the man who plots the data on each card, point by point, as information is received. Councilmen, civic organizations, newspapers, etc., wanting copies of any record card should be able to get blue prints or photographs at a nominal charge of say ten cents per card copy. The New York Public Library is successfully working a plan by which photographs of any page of any book in the library can be provided to readers in a few hours at a cost of only twenty-five cents per page. A similar plan could be used for the suggested copies of official curve records.
Progress in the government of the world, and especially in the government of cities and of industrial corporations, has been greatly retarded by the fact that the only information available to executive officers has been provided to the executive in the form which is most convenient for the use of the accountant. It is, of course, necessary that records should be kept accurately from the standpoint of good accounting, and the author has no complaint to make of accounting methods in so far as accuracy is concerned. It is not, however, right that executive officers who must determine policies and who must make instant decisions should be forced to base all their decisions on information provided to them only in the form of the accountant's standard arrangement of balance sheet and operating statement.
The accountant must necessarily take a bird's-eye view of the whole business from time to time, so that he may see how all the component parts add together, to make certain that he gets a balance. The result is that the accounting officer usually makes up a periodic
