fects of the law on the urban commune.--Disproportion
between the administrative capacity of its elected
representatives and the work imposed on them.--Lack of a
special and permanent manager.--The municipal council and
the mayor.--The general council and the intermediary
committee.--The prefect.--His dominant rule.--His obligatory
concessions.--His principal aim.--Bargains between the
central authority and the local Jacobins.--Effect on this on
local government, on the officials, and in local finances.

Let us now look at the other side of the scale, on the side of the large
urban communes, of which there are 223, with above 10,000 inhabitants,
90 of these above 20,000 inhabitants, 9 of the latter above 100,000
inhabitants, and Paris, which has 2,300,000.[4228] We see at the first
glance cast upon an average specimen of these human anthills, a town
containing from 40,000 to 50,000 souls, how vast and complex the
collective undertaking becomes, how many principal and accessory
services the communal society must co-ordinate and unite together in
order to secure to its members the advantages of public roads and insure
their protection against spreading calamities:

* Maintenance and repairs of these roads, the straightening, laying-out,
paving, and drainage, the constructions and expense for sewers, quays,
and rivers, and often for a commercial harbor;

* the negotiations and arrangements with departments and with the state
for this or that harbor, canal, dike, or insane asylum; the contracts
with cab, omnibus, and tramway companies and with telephone and
house-lighting companies; the street-lighting, artesian wells and
aqueducts;

* the city police, supervision and rules for using public highways,
and orders and agents for preventing men from injuring each other when
collected together in large assemblies in the streets, in the markets,
at the theater, in any public place, whether coffee-houses or taverns;

* the firemen and machinery for conflagrations; the sanitary measures
against contagion, and precautions, long beforehand to insure hygiene
during epidemics;

* and, as extra burdens and abuses, the establishment, direction and
support of primary schools, colleges, public lectures, libraries,
theaters, hospitals, and other institutions which should be supported
and governed by different associations; at the very least, the
appropriations to these establishments and theref