County Down

“ While the county nonchalantly and with seeming impunity has been breaking all the inconvenient statutes, the state in its own peculiar way has been working out a method of “taking it out” of the county for the indignities of nullification. The state’s “big stick” (which it does not always employ to a public purpose) is a policy of meddlesomeness which expresses itself through special legislation. ”

“ The county is small enough to serve as a convenient unit for assessment operations and assessment records and furnishes the basis of a system of fewer units than if the town were the basis. Under the county plan, moreover, there are fewer opportunities for communities to compete against each other in their effort to escape their just share of the general burden of government. It is significant that most of the western states have seen the advantages [Pg 126] of the county as the local unit of administration. ”

“ Administration apart from fiscal supervision in other departments, such as charities, prisons and public health, has advanced much more slowly than reform in the fields which have been mentioned. But every indication for the future is toward greater control through accounting and supervision. The county acts locally in the enforcement of state obligations. The real trouble comes when one undertakes, arbitrarily, to place any given county activity in the local or state category. ”

“ Where the pure town system prevails the county plays but little part in local administration, and in some States like Rhode Island there are, strictly speaking, no county officers, the county being merely a judicial district without corporate personality. ”

“ The county was my own native county—upon which, in its southern section, more than upon any equal area known to man past or present, had descended the original curse of labour in its heaviest form, not mastering the bodies only of men, as of slaves, or criminals in mines, but working through the fiery will. Upon no equal space of earth was, or ever had been, the same energy of human power put forth daily. ”

“ It may be that the act in imposing upon the county of Mobile the entire burden of improving the river, bay, and harbor of Mobile is harsh and oppressive, and that it would have been more just to the people of the county if the legislature had apportioned the expenses of the improvement, which was to benefit the whole State, among all its counties. ”

“ Instead of working as now through alien instruments in the person of independent officials, it will control the operating mechanism of the county, which will be of its own selection. Shall we take away from the people the power to choose the sheriffs, the county clerk, the surveyor, the superintendent of the poor? Yes, take away the selection, but reinforce their control. Abandon the separation of powers? Yes, do away with the three-ring (or perhaps twelve- or twenty-ring) circus, and get down to the serious business of government. ”

“ This particular Poor Farm is in one of the richest counties of the state. The taxable property of that county is assessed at more than $45,000,000. It contains no large cities (the largest has a population of 15,000) , all but two per cent. of the people are native-born and the proportion of negroes is much less than in the state as a whole. ”

“ They had taken as firm root in the land as the county families whose title-deeds and leases, wills and codicils they kept. They were well-bred, well-educated, God-fearing people, with no struggling ambitions, no morbid craving to get upon a higher social level than the status to which their professional position and their means entitled them. They rode and drove good horses, kept good servants, lived in a good house, visited among the county people with moderation, but they made no pretensions to being “smart.” ”

“ Always they are the product either of some personal initiative or some organized effort. Does any county clearly lack that element of citizen leadership? Then the obvious need of the county is to bridge that gap. The rural population of America suffers (the word is all too weak) for the lack of a public community sense. Every “average” rural citizen is a unit, he does not travel in droves—so much for his independence. ”

“ But under our twentieth-century social system, which has unfortunately displaced so many influential and respected county families—every one of which had military or naval members, relations or ancestors—by wealthy tradesmen, speculators, and the like, any efficient County Association will be very hard to create. ”

“ What a chance for the exercise of the arts of persuasion in procuring a contract, all the advantages of which should be on one side, but which must affect the interests of the county after it should have become well populated.
But we are not left to surmise on this subject. This small population was divided into seven civil townships, each one of which had a supervisor; and these supervisors, when assembled at the county seat, constituted the governing body of the county. ”

“ Amused ourselves this evening by looking a little into the state of things in our own neighborhood, as reported by the last general Census; comparing the condition of our own county with that of others in the same State. The growth of the inland region, to which our valley belongs, will prove, in most respects, a good example of the state of the country generally. The advance of this county has always been steady and healthful; things have never been pushed forward with the unnatural and exhausting impetus of speculation, to be followed by reaction. ”

“ And so, county government everywhere was conceived in a spirit of negation. The people elect their boards of supervisors or county commissioners, hoping thereby to keep their fingers on the public purse through direct agents. The supervisors, in their turn, undertake to regulate the finances of the sheriff, the district attorney, the county clerk and the rest. But, lo, these officers are no subordinates of theirs; they are the people’s humble servants. The supervisors may set out upon a program of economy and efficiency, including, let us say, the standardization of supplies. ”

“ The county of the past has lacked opportunity to “do itself proud.” The county of the future will be equipped to do interesting things in an interesting way. But it must develop policies—real politics—as a substitute for the interest that has made place hunting and place holding a basic rural industry. The farmer of the future must be given something more wholesome to think about “during the long winter evenings” than who is to be the next coroner; and he must cease to measure his freedom by the number of offices he attempts to fill with his ballot. ”

“ Like the county officers in many another state, the officials in the Indiana counties, according to a message of former Governor Mount, “had been following precedents on an ascending scale.”
If the whole trouble lies in the personnel of government, there is either no real county problem or else the problem is unsolved. If it is merely a matter of men, the voters of the county need only, when the next election falls due, to “turn the rascals out” and elect more promising successors. ”

“ Impressed by this striking circumstance, a body of citizens formed themselves into a permanent Federation to look deeper and longer into this back alley of their civic life. They found that the court house incident was but the most dramatic of a hundred falls from grace. The Public Efficiency Society of Cook County, Ill., the Westchester County Research Bureau, the Taxpayers’ Association of Suffolk County, the Nassau County Association in New York and the Tax Association of Alameda County in California have all been richly repaid for their investments in county government research. ”

“ Nowhere does the record state that because the people elected long strings of officers, the people therefore controlled those officers. All the while the services which government could render have become more and more numerous and the public needs of the people more pressing. And all the while too, the filling and holding of office for office sake has been vested with exaggerated importance, so that the county more perhaps than any other civil division has been the home of fictitious political “issues.” ”

“ The county remains the last fortress of the spoils system because the people as a whole have not been fully awakened to the importance of its work and because the political influences which control county government have heretofore been strong enough to prevent the loss of patronage which the introduction of the merit system would entail. ”

“ The county can make no such appeal, and it is a political fact to be reckoned with that however you may urge that the county is an essential part of city government, that the city electorate is almost equivalent to the county electorate, and should assert an equal proprietorship, it is almost impossible to overcome the obsession that the county is an alien thing. ”

“ The reputation of the county as an agricultural district dates from the vast improvements of heaths, wastes, sheepwalks, and warrens, by enclosure and manuring—the fruit of the zealous exertions of Lord Townshend and a few neighbouring land-owners—which were, ere long, happily imitated by others. Since these improvements were effected, rents have risen in that county from one or two shillings to fifteen or twenty shillings per acre; a country of sheep-walks and rabbit-warrens has been rendered highly productive ”

“ What could such a county do for its citizens?
It should be kept in mind that this county of the imagination with which we are particularly concerned will be practically confined to rural and semi-rural localities. Here, even while we dream, a very actual metamorphosis is going on which inevitably promotes a sense of community interest. Thanks to Alexander Graham Bell and Henry Ford, the countryside is getting together in spite of itself! The rural gentry will think in bigger units and the basis of its allegiances will be correspondingly broadened. ”

“ In a county like Lincolnshire, mainly agricultural, in which the operations of man are, for the most part, confined to the earth’s crust, in ploughing and sowing, and, as some one has said, in “tickling” the earth’s surface into fertility,—in such a county we are not led ordinarily to explore the inner bowels of the world; as is necessary in mining districts such as certain parts of Yorkshire, Durham, Cornwall and elsewhere. ”

“ Striking out the provision authorizing county treasurer to appoint an attorney. Regulating tax collection procedure. Fixing compensation of unskilled laborers. Correcting 1915 tax roll. Creating a county auditor. Increasing salary of sheriff, etc. Levy of taxes to meet cost of sanitary trunk sewer. Regulating management of penitentiary and workhouse. Creating commissioner of charities.
Too often the motive of the legislators has not [Pg 117] been to make the county the state’s more obedient servant, but to “bleed” it to the utmost for political purposes. ”

“ Better county government, however, involves a good deal more than a mere skeleton of organization. It is not enough to provide the means for fixing responsibility in a general though fundamental sense, in officers who are conspicuous and powerful. That is the beginning of efficiency. ”

“ Although local government in township, hundred and shire is as old as the Constitution itself, the birthday of the modern county councils in 1888 is from the historian's point of view an event of the first importance, for it deprived the county magistracy of a prerogative which for more than five hundred years had been steadily growing in completeness, by suddenly transferring the destinies of the rural police to a body that owed the half of its authority to the popular vote of the shire. ”

“ It was the very time that we stood sadly in need of every man and of every vote. We lost the county that Summit is in by a small majority. If an active and aggressive man, such as the one whose name I now place before you, had been postmaster at Summit, the result in that County might have been different. ”

“ It is apparent that the city people have much more control over the county government than the election of the Commissioners Court would indicate. Many of the county functions which most concern the city, for example, tax assessment and collection, are under the jurisdiction of officials elected by the county at large. ”

“ With a combination of a structure of government designed to fix general responsibility, an administrative procedure designed to let daylight into public business and an administrative personnel free to serve the interests of the public, the people of the county will be in a position to just about get what they want, within the measure of power granted to the locality under the laws of the state. ”

“ Great nobles, neighbouring landowners, the Crown itself, seized on the boroughs as their prey, and dictated the choice of their representatives. Corruption did whatever force failed to do: and from the Wars of the Roses to the days of Pitt the voice of the people had to be looked for not in the members for the towns but in the knights for the counties.
Restriction of County Franchise
The restriction of the county franchise on the other hand was the direct work of the Parliament itself. Economic changes were fast widening the franchise in the shires. ”