INTRODUCTION
The plan for state and municipal governments generally accepted in the United States in the middle period of the nineteenth century gave great satisfaction in the provincial and frontier communities where it was adopted and which then composed the principal part of the United States. In many nooks and corners of the country today we have relics of this provincial and frontier society. In such districts this plan for state and municipal governments is entirely satisfactory in practice. To depart from it would be unwise, for the reason that in matters of government that which is and which is not positively objectionable should be let alone. Frequently men of talent and power, whose youth was spent in the provincial and frontier era of our social and political development, still find conditions about them not so much changed. To them the mid-nineteenth-century plan and its practice are entirely satisfactory. Any criticism of it would at once meet with a vigorous and, no doubt, from the point of view of provincial and frontier conditions, a complete defense. To the inhabitants of those parts of the United States where such provincial and frontier conditions still exist the following essay is not addressed.
So long as the more simple and primitive conditions of society which obtained in the first half of the nineteenth century were all but universal in the United States, any criticism of the plan of state and municipal government which prevailed was a purely academic exercise. Even when, in some districts, conditions had changed and great cities had arisen with enormous wealth and population, to which the mid-nineteenth-century plan of government did not seem to fit in practice, the majority were still so far satisfied as to make any criticism of that plan of merely speculative value. But in the second decade of the twentieth century the provincial and frontier type of society will be found to embrace a distinct minority of the population of the country. The social conditions presented by a large population in a small area, with a highly organized and differentiated social structure, have become common to a large portion of the population of the entire country. Whether the application of a mid-nineteenth-century plan of government to these conditions is satisfactory is, therefore, no longer an academic or speculative question. Its due consideration has perhaps rather become to the last degree vital to the life of the nation. To those who are face to face with this problem the following essay is addressed.