ch system must
be devised if the holding of properly at all be regarded as moral
and necessary to our civilization. Remember that you are, in a large
sense, but a chartered joint-stock corporation. Can you imagine the
control of any other joint-stock corporation delivered over to those
who have no stock or the least stock in it? Can you imagine the New
York & New Haven Railroad, for example, controlled by the
passengers, to the exclusion of the stock holders? Now this, to a
very great degree, is what has happened in many of our cities. We
have deprived the true stockholders, in some cases, of any
representation whatever. I thus hold that to give property some
voice in the control of a municipal corporation is but sense and
justice.

e. We have tried commissions in Buffalo in branches of our city
government. They have tried them in nearly every city in this
country. We have governed our police by commissions, our parks by
commissions, our public works by commissions. Commission government
was for many years a fad in this country, and it has become
discredited, so that of late we have been doing away with
commissions and coming to single heads for departments having
executive functions and some minor legislative functions, such as
park boards, and police boards, and have been trying to concentrate
responsibility in that way. In Erie County and throughout New York a
commission elected by the people governs our counties. The board of
supervisors is a commission government. It has never been
creditable--always bad, even as compared with our city governments.
To be sure, it is not just that kind of commission government. It is
a larger commission; it is not elected at large, but by districts,
but it is an attempt at the same thing. So I say there is nothing
new about this idea of government by a commission.

CHAPTER IV

THE ARGUMENT WRITTEN OUT

49. The Brief and the Argument. If your brief is thoroughly worked
out, and based on a careful canvass of the evidence, the work on your
argument ought to be at least two thirds over. The last third, however,
is not to be slighted, for on it will largely depend your practical
results in moving your readers. Even a legal argument rarely goes to the
court on a written brief alone; and the average reader will never put
himself to the effort of reading through a