Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: COUNCIL GOVERNMENT VERSUS MAYOR GOVERNMENT. II. WE pass now to a more theoretical discussion of the relations between the legislative and the executive authorities in municipal organization. While the advocates of an increase in the power of the mayor sometimes fail to present careful theoretical arguments in favor of their position, it seems possible to discover at the basis of their reasoning two general lines of thought, which, though often not sharply distinguished, are widely different and are even inconsistent with each other. The first is that based on the idea of the separation of powers. It holds that in municipal government, as in higher grades, we should aim to mark off, as distinctly as possible, the legislative from the executive sphere. The earlier system, which gave to the council the undivided authority, sinned against this principle; and the present movement toward increasing the mayor's power seeks only to secure to the executive its proper coordinate position. The second line of thought is that based on the idea of the centralization of all power and responsibility. This idea may best be realized by making one man, the mayor, the dominant authority, relegating the council to a narrow sphere or abolishing it altogether. The present section will be devoted to a discussion of the first line of argument. The Considerations which are advanced in favor of the separation of powers in municipal government may be grouped under three heads: (i) that thereby needed checks and balances are introduced; (2) that thus a natural and advantageous division of labor is established; (3) that this separation is necessary to prevent politics from interfering as to the personnel of the executive department. I. It is to be observed, in the first place, that, while the argu...