PUBLISHED FOR THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1899 All rights reserved LIBRARY OF THE LELAND STANFORD JR. UNIVERSITY. A.37429. COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Norwood Press J. 8. Cushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith Norwood Mass. U.S.A. PREFACE THE main topics treated in this volume and the reasons for the order of their presentation are so fully explained in the introductory chapter that few words are needed here. The lack of any generally accepted municipal system in the United States and the contrariety of opinion concerning the most important methods of municipal government are recognized facts, and they must largely affect the treatment of our subject. Conflicts of opinion and serious disputes about theories and methods would be unavoidable even if nothing further should be attempted than a plan of city government formed by compilation and deductions from American precedents and experience alone. I must think that such a treatment of the matters we are to deal with would be quite inadequate; for very instructive lessons in municipal government can be best studied in the practical methods, and the results of administration in the leading cities of Europe, where municipal experience has been much longer and more varied than in the United States. Nevertheless, our municipal system must be framed in harmony with our constitutional principles and social life; so that, while nothing intrinsically good should be rejected merely because of its foreign origin, nothing can be adopted unless compatible with the fundamental theories of republican government. Despite the fact that no view of city governments is so uniform and pervading in the United States as the opinion |