rative through the
efforts of those local officials who are sworn to enforce it. The
practical working of this system often gives to a local community an
administrative veto on such general laws of the state as may be opposed
to local sentiment. By this means the general executive authority of the
state is weakened and its responsibility correspondingly diminished.

In still another respect the policy of dividing authority and parcelling
it out between separate and distinct organs of government has been
carried much farther in the state than in the Federal Constitution.
Unlike the Federal government in which executive power is centralized in
the President, the state constitutions have created a number of separate
officials, boards and commissions, some directly elected and some
appointed, independent of each other and irresponsible except in so far
as a fixed term of office implies responsibility. This means that
instead of one executive the state has many. Only one of them--the
governor--has, it is true, a veto on the enactment of laws; but this, as
we have seen, is really a legislative and not an executive power. Each
of these has what may be termed an administrative veto; that is, the
power to negative the laws which they are expected to administer by
simply not enforcing them. The impossibility of securing an honest and
faithful administration of the laws where the responsibility for their
enforcement is divided between a number of separate and practically
independent officials, is clearly shown in the experience of the various
states. The evils of this system are illustrated in the state laws
enacted for the purpose of controlling the railway business. Provision
is usually made for their enforcement through a railway commission
either directly elected or appointed by the governor. That direct
election by the people for a fixed term, thereby securing independence
during that term, fails to guarantee the enforcement of such laws is
strikingly shown in the experience of California, where this body has
been continually under the domination of the railway interests.[159]

Under a system which thus minutely subdivides and distributes the
administrative function, any effective control over the execution of
state laws is made impossible. The governor, who is nominally the head
of the executive agencies of the state, is not in reality responsible,
since he has no adequate power to compel the enforcement of laws
directly en