constituency, it would by-and-by be demonstrated that the powers and privileges which were amply sufficient for the small constituency were too limited when the growth of the city demanded increased facilities and improvements.
An attempt would then be made to meet these demands, not by abrogating the original act of incorporation and substituting for it such a system as should be comprehensive and sufficiently elastic to respond to all legitimate demands that should be made on the governing power, but by amendments and additions, and the substitution of boards of commissions, until the whole system became inextricably involved. As a result we find in many municipalities separate boards of control for the government of the fire and police departments, election boards, school boards, boards of health, boards of visitors, and so on, until the multiplication of authorities has subdivided responsibility into homœopathic quantities. The tendency is also to apply the homœopathic treatment, and, on the theory of similia similibus curantur, to meet the constantly increasing difficulties by the creation of more of these boards and commissions.
We have in this country had an extensive and disastrous experience in this constant effort to meet the increasing demands of local government by supplemental legislation, but so far as I can ascertain we have not yet even approximated the achievements of our English cousins in this patchwork style of city government.
The English municipal reform bill was passed in 1834. Since then there have been passed seventy additional acts, all of which are in force, and which are applicable to all boroughs. These are supplemented by nineteen further acts, which, to a greater or less extent, effect these municipal organizations.
In addition to these acts I find it stated in a number of the "Contemporary Review" that there was, at least until recently, comprised within the limits of one poor-law union, two municipal boroughs with town councils, eleven local board districts, three boards of guardians, twenty-four bodies of overseers, five burial boards, two school boards, and one highway board—in all forty-eight local authorities, each acting independently and having jurisdiction in the same territory; a condition of things that would seem in contrast to render Babel a veritable haven of rest.
Our own experiments with this system of government by local boards and special commissions, whether these independent bodies have been created to meet some pressing need for which the organic act of incorporation did not make provision, or whether organized in the hope of rescuing a part of the municipal machinery from the control of the Tweeds and McManes and their disciples and imitators have been alike disastrous: the first, because the imperium in imperio is necessarily self destructive; and the second, because the vultures which prey upon the body politic will as certainly find the means to
