ple and coherent in detail. In a sense I care
nothing about the precise suggestions submitted in the preceding
paragraphs. They are offered, not as a definite plan of local political
organization, but as the illustration of a principle. The principle is
that both power and responsibility in affairs of local government should
be peculiarly concentrated. It cannot be concentrated without some
simplification of machinery and without giving either the legislature or
the executive a dominant authority. In the foregoing plan the executive
has been made dominant, because as a matter of fact recent political
experience has conclusively proved that the executives, elected by the
whole constituency, are much more representative of public opinion than
are the delegates of petty districts. One hundred district agents
represent only one hundred districts and not the whole state, or the
state in so far as it is whole. In the light of current American
political realities the executive deserves the greater share of
responsibility and power; and that is why the proposal is made to bestow
it on him. The other details of the foregoing plan have been proposed in
a similar spirit. They are innovations; but they are innovations which
may naturally (and perhaps should) result from certain living practices
and movements in American local politics. They merely constitute an
attempt to give those ideas and practices candid recognition. No such
reorganization may ever be reached in American local government; and I
may have made essential mistakes in estimating the real force of certain
current practices and the real value of certain remedial expedients. But
on two points the argument admits of no concession. Any practical scheme
of local institutional reform must be based on the principle of more
concentrated responsibility and power, and it must be reached by
successive experimental attempts to give a more consistent and efficient
form to actual American political practices.

The bestowal upon an executive of increased official responsibility and
power will be stigmatized by "old-fashioned Democrats" as dangerously
despotic; and it may be admitted that in the case of the central
government, any official increase of executive power might bring with it
the risk of usurpation. The Constitution of the United States has made
the President a much more responsible and vigorous executive in his own
sphere of action than are the governors of the several s