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THE GREEN BAG
whether involving the appropriation of money or not, are looked into beforehand, either by the selectmen or by a "warrant committee" appointed at the beginning of the year by the moderator, and their recom mendations, together with a statement of the situation, are sometimes reported to the town in print before the meeting. It must not be supposed that such recommenda tions are always implicitly followed, but they do serve, to a very large extent, to simplify the business of town meeting, and to make it possible to continue the system of town government long after the affairs of a town have grown too complicated for the unaided understanding of most of the voters. And the future of the system of town government? When a town grows too large for the voters to meet and settle their affairs in a deliberative assembly, it usually gets a city charter, and there is at once introduced into the municipal government that system of representation which has so many drawbacks. Even in those fortunate cities where party politics are kept out of municipal affairs, the practice of compro mises and log-rolling is apt to appear, and the representative of one constituency may, for the purpose of securing support for measures beneficial to his constituency rather than to the whole city, trade his vote and countenance measures and extrav agances which, as a private citizen, he would condemn. The desire to please one's constituency and thus secure a reelection is a temptation which does not beset the voters of a town; they legislate for them selves and do not need reelection. Again, in a city government there is apt to be an idea that those in office, the "ad ministration," must make a good showing and keep down the tax rate. While this, to a certain extent, acts as a check on extravagance, it also has a tendency to cripple certain departments of the city gov ernment, and work which ought to be done is sometimes sacrificed for expenditures
which it is more politic for the administra tion to make. Moreover, an administra tion can frequently escape the burden and odium of its extravagances by borrowing money instead of raising it by taxation, and thus a city is apt to become burdened with a debt for current expenses which ought, on sound financial principles, to be paid when they were incurred. In a town, on the other hand, the voters are their own "administration," and the desire to make a good showing to a constituency of electors does not exist. These and other considerations have led some of the New England towns to cling tenaciously to their form of town govern ment even after their size would warrant the adoption of a form of representative city government. In this connection it is particularly interesting to notice the step which the city of Newport, Rhode Island, has just taken to go back, to a certain extent, to the town meeting system in order to escape some of the disadvantages of a representative form of government in the hands of a small body of men. The city has adopted a modified system of town government, intended to meet the difficulties of applying the regular town meeting system to a large community. In stead of allowing all the voters of Newport to meet and manage the municipal affairs, the new charter 1 requires them to select 195 of their number, that is, about as many as can comfortably meet as a deliberative body, and this selected body then proceeds, much like the 200 voters which might gather in any town meeting, to direct the affairs of the municipality. Other voters may speak but not vote, at such meeting. This select body elects the important muni cipal officers (except the mayor and alder men), appropriates money, and, generally speaking, exercises the powers vested in towns in town meeting. There is also a 1 Public Laws, chap. 1392, passed April 19 1906.
