520 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
year ago gave to Michigan municipalities a very considerable degree of real self-government. The Michigan legislature, acting under the constitutional provision, has enacted laws in obedience to its mandates working out the details of an effective home rule.
A healthy movement for genuine home rule has been inau- gurated in Wisconsin, the first steps having been taken at the Marinette meeting of the Wisconsin League of Municipalities. Although the recent legislature provided for an optional form of commission government, the movement referred to is of a more general character, in that it leaves to each city the working out of its own framework of municipal government, rather than allowing it to make a choice between its existing form and the somewhat cumbersome form of commission provided for in the Wisconsin statute of 1909.
Spread of interest in the commission form of government has been rapid and wide-spread and shows, as do the figures already quoted, how keenly municipal students, legislators and administrators are seeking some effective solution of the compli- cated difficulties of the modern municipal problem.
The principle of the Galveston plan (which has been extended to other Texan cities — Houston, Fort Worth, Greenville, El Paso, Austin, Denison, San Antonio, Waco, Dallas) was taken up by Des Moines, Iowa, in 1907 and expanded to include the expression of the public will through the initiative, the refer- endum, and the recall ; and safeguarded by the application of the merit system to all appointive officers and employees, namely all officials except the commissioners, and by the non-partisan open primary. In the words of an advocate of the system, the non- partisan primary
will eliminate partisan politics in municipal affairs. Civil service will do away with the patronage system. The recall gives the people a club to hold over a dishonest or inefficient official if such an one should be elected. The provision for the abandonment of the commission form after four years does away with the argument that people should not adopt the com- mission plan because there was no means of getting rid of it, if it did not prove successful. The initiative and referendum give the people a direct voice in legislation.
The Kansas law has an additional provision that the commission-
