The county has been put to its severest test in modern urban communities.

In the latter part of the eighteenth century began the away-from-the-farm movement. The discovery of steam power and its application to every department of industry began to draw men, women and children from their homes to earn a livelihood in the new industrial order. It became necessary for them to congregate in factories; they could no longer spread themselves out over the countryside. Out of the factory system came the city, came hundreds of cities along the coasts and rivers and even on the open prairies. New methods of transportation accelerated the process. The movement has never stopped; not even yet, when more than a third of the country’s inhabitants are living in cities of twenty-five thousand inhabitants and more. Out of the growth of cities came congestion of population; out of congestion, problems of very existence without number.

The colonial heritage of local government was wholly unadapted to any such emergency. In simple pioneer communities it was easy to provide government that met the unexacting standards of the times. Efficient government was not a live issue. Government, good or bad, was little needed and there was little of it. And if that little was ill-conceived, what matter?

But the time came when local government began to feel the strain of new responsibilities. Cities failed miserably—“conspicuously.” Counties failed even more miserably but without observation. It was not so much that local government was called upon to perform more services, but that it was to adapt itself to new conditions of service, to execute old forms of service in a more intensive fashion. For instance, in a general way, the state had charged the county with the protection of life. Under rural conditions the obligation seems to have been performed tolerably well, because violations of the law are rarer where population is thin. A sheriff, with the help of a few constables and the power to summon citizens to his aid in times of special emergency, was all the police that was needed in most communities. With the growth of the city the police problem was intensified even out of proportion to the numbers of the people. Keeping the peace came to mean no longer the mere matter of quelling disturbances. The city with its teeming population not only bred violence and disorder, but it afforded opportunities for immunity through concealment. A new police problem quite foreign to the capacities of the ancient office of sheriff grew up. The city had to meet the professional, scientific criminal with specialized instrumentalities and organization. Crowds on the congested city streets had to be taken care of and numerous other incidentals of the congested city had to be foreseen.

The city likewise developed an entirely new problem of public charity, which quite outgrew the capacities of that amateur sociologist, the county poormaster.

The coroner, too, sadly missed the mark in numerous cases. In the new industrial order in the cities, not only was criminal violence multiplied but industrial fatalities added heavily to the terrors of city life for the working class. The civil liabilities which were imposed upon employers and upon insurance companies made it more than ever important that every sudden or suspicious death be investigated with the utmost scientific thoroughness. Such service it was of course impossible for the untrained elective political coroner to render, and the world will never know the costly mistakes that are chargeable to his inexpertness.

In the fullness of time court organization also revealed the necessity for differentiation between various classes of cases which were presented for settlement. Again, the protection of life against communicable diseases and of property against fire were two functions that the rural local government had completely overlooked or neglected, and when urban conditions arose in the midst of the county there was nothing in the original local government machinery that could be made to respond to these needs. The county was apparently stereotyped to minister to local conditions as they were conceived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its organization was merely adapted to perform the simple cut-and-dried services that had been laid down for it in centuries gone by. Its expansion into new and bigger fields of service seems never to have been seriously considered.

But the pungent fact is that counties, when they have ceased to serve the needs of urban life, have been so slow to retire from the field.

What state has stripped the sheriff of his power to interfere in a riot or a strike to the infinite annoyance of the thousand per cent. more competent police force of the city? How very few states have shown the coroner the door and replaced him with a scientifically trained medical examiner! Not less ridiculous the board of county supervisors in great cities like Chicago, Cleveland and Milwaukee, solemnly ruling over a territory almost identical in its extent with the bailiwick of the city authorities. Why should not a single body do all the local regulating?

And so, the urban county problem is first of all a question of ill-adapted instruments of government perpetuated long past their period of utility.

In the second place it is a matter of duplication and conflict of organization and effort as between the city and the county. When the charter in Los Angeles County was revised in 1912 it was found that in the urban communities three separate groups of officers were charged with keeping the peace: the sheriff and his deputies, the constables of the several townships and the police of the city. Their duties were substantially the same, they covered the same ground. The public scattered its civic attention accordingly. It was this same state of California which within the last twenty years has authorized its cities to have separate tax assessors—two sets of officials to go out and get precisely the same information. Ever since that time the taxable property in the city has been rated differently by the two sets of officers. And the reason? Apparently a double one: to enable the individual counties to beat down their proportion of the state tax and at the same time to allow the cities to raise their valuations and keep down the tax rate. The political value of a double set of officers is of course not to be overlooked.

An unpublished report of the City Club of Milwaukee reveals a paralleling of city and county services at numerous points. The city was found to be maintaining an emergency hospital, a tuberculosis sanitarium and a corps of milk inspectors, while the county maintained similar services through a general hospital, a tuberculosis sanitarium, a visiting physician and a district nurse. The county jail and the police station were in close proximity but under separate jurisdictions. Where the county handled public works through an engineering department the city operated through a highway department, each unit requiring practically the same sort of administrative and technical direction. City and county did their purchasing separately and in the respective public works departments there was a duplication of testing laboratories and of engineering and other service records. Separate city and county regulative or governing bodies added materially both to the expense of government and to the number of elective officers.

Then again, the urban county, including judicial officers, has contributed more to the length of the ballot than any other division of government. In the year 1910 before the adoption of the present charter, the Los Angeles city ballot, which has been frequently exhibited as a horrible example, contained the names of candidates for forty-five separate offices. Twenty-eight of these belonged to the county-township system!

The Chicago voter, as the result of the early influences plus the additions to the number of offices which have been made from time to time, casts a ballot for about twenty-five candidates, including the sheriff, the treasurer, county clerk, clerk of the probate court, clerk of the criminal court, president of the county commissioners, ten county commissioners, judge of the county court. The voter in Omaha, in addition to the usual run of county officers, selects also thirty-two deputy tax assessors, all on a single ballot. In most states these officers are chosen on the same day and on the same ballot with a long list of state and judicial officers, so that the county election is only an incidental and minor issue in the whole complicated business.

On election day the urban county offices are usually found at the bottom of the ballot. Usually numerous and obscure enough in their own right in the country districts, their contributions to the obscurity of voting in the city are more than doubly important.

When to an immoderately long ballot, to duplication of functions as between county and city, there is added a multiplicity of local government units, all considerations of responsibility in government or intelligence of citizenship fall to the ground. Such is the case in Cook County, Illinois, where the Bureau of Public Efficiency has issued a striking little pamphlet on The Nineteen Local Governments in Chicago. (The number has since been increased to twenty-two.) Twenty-two separate taxing bodies, and one hundred and forty-four officials which every Chicago voter is expected to choose! Is it a wonder that “Mr. Voter,” to quote the title of an accompanying cartoon, is “dazed?” As the pamphlet says: “The large number of local governments in Chicago, with their very large number of elective officials, independent of one another, operates to produce not only inefficient public service but an enormous waste of public revenues. The present multiplicity of governing bodies, with a lack of centralized control and the long ballot, results in confusing complexity and makes gross inefficiency and waste on a large scale inevitable.”

The city too has proven itself an altogether unfavorable environment for clean, active county citizenship. A thousand and one preoccupations and distractions in the city have strongly tended to drive the populace to forget that it even lives in a county. The county does little for the city dweller. It does not keep his house from burning or his pockets from being picked. It does not build the streets on which he travels nor perform any humane services which could stir his admiration. The sheriff is no neighbor of his nor does he hear of that officer from one year’s end to another, unless it be his rare fortune to be a party to some legal action. The newspapers, to be sure, are apt to give a great deal of space to criminal trials and feature the activities of the district attorney. But even that is apt to be directed more to metropolitan sensationalism than to helpful citizenship.

The greater the power entrusted to the municipalities within the county, the more interesting things it is given to do, in just that measure does the county itself suffer from inattention on the part of the citizens, till the extreme is reached in a condition described in a report on Cook County by Prof. F. D. Bramhall of the University of Chicago:

“The city corporate stands in the mind of most men for their local government; it has its picturesque history, its visible physical embodiments, its corporate personality, its stimulus to the pride of its people and its claim upon their loyalty. The county can make no such appeal, and it is a political fact to be reckoned with that however you may urge that the county is an essential part of city government, that the city electorate is almost equivalent to the county electorate, and should assert an equal proprietorship, it is almost impossible to overcome the obsession that the county is an alien thing. There is no more serious consequence of the parceling out of our local governmental powers and the shattering of responsibility for our municipal housekeeping than just this forfeiture of the sense of identification with government and the force of local patriotism which should be a tremendous asset for American political government.”

Without a doubt, the urban, and particularly the metropolitan county, is the county at its worst.