In theory the national government has no control whatever over the forms or functions of municipal government. In practice, however, the Federal government exercises considerable indirect control over cities through its control of interstate commerce and the use of the post roads, as well as through its control over navi gable waters and the development of natural resources such as water powers. Still more important in practical effect is the judicial con trol exercised by the Federal courts over the actions of municipal governments affecting con tracts and property rights. The Federal gov ernment, of course, has complete control of the city of Washington, and at the beginning of President Wilson's administration it was sug gested that an effort should be made to make Washington distinctively a model city to which all the other cities of the country could look for the latest and best developments in admin istrative machinery and municipal practices. In fact, the Federal government has for many years endeavored to co-operate with cities throughout the country, particularly in the development of a uniform system of accounts and the publication of uniform statistics and in the establishment of uniform standards for the testing and control of the gas supply. These activities, however, are purely advisory.
In the extra-legal aspects of the relations between municipal government and the State •and national governments, the political issues which have their origin in municipal problems are becoming very important. In the early stages of the municipal reform movement in this country, it was thought necessary to sepa rate municipal elections from State and national elections so that the voters would not be con fused by political issues and by the exigencies of party strife in the selection of their local officials. Prof. Frank J. Goodnow, the eminent authority on administrative law, was a pioneer in trying to work out a proper delimitation of the spheres of local and State government in order to find a basis for an intelligent home rule program. This task, however, proved to be one of very great difficulty and in spite of the continued efforts of scholars in the univer sities, reformers in the National Municipal League and other organizations, and public offi cials in various associations for the promotion of home rule, no exact definition of the proper scope of municipal government thus far devised has yet met with general acceptance. In fact, while the sentiment for municipal home rule has been slowly finding expression in constitu tional and statutory provisions, conditions have been growing up which make cities necessarily more and more dependent upon each other and upon the State and nation. A theory of home rule which might have been considered adequate 20 or 30 years ago would now be subject to important modification, in view of the fact that urban interests and urban problems have, as it were, overflowed the boundaries of the munici palities and have become, especially in the more densely populated Commonwealths of the East, closely identified with State interests and State problems. The old demand for the separation of State and local elections and politics has thus lost much of its force. With the election
of United States senators by direct vote of the people the chief link that formerly tied the State government to national politics has been broken so that at the present time the more logical line of separation as to elections and political issues is between municipal and State on the one hand and national on the other, but even here a solidarity of interests is arising, notably in connection with the development of water power and the conservation of natural resources, which tends to make undesirable any hard and fast separation of political organi zations and issues among local, State and national.
3. Relation of Cities to County and Town ship Counties are in the main divisions of the State established for con venience in the administration of State laws through the agency of locally elected officials. The functions of the county usually include the prosecution of criminals, the keeping of records relating to the title of property, the adminis tration of the Inheritance Law, the care of the poor, the supervision of public education and the planning and execution of certain major improvements such as important highways, bridges and drainage schemes. The primary functions performed by counties are universal ones, and the absence of any strict adminis trative control by the State government over county affairs, together with the original preva lence of the fee system through which many of the county officers have received their compen sation, has made county government all but universally the football of politics, and county officials everywhere the main cogs in the ma chine of one or the other of the two principal parties, according to whether the one or the other has been in control in particular counties. These conditions tend to establish a situation very embarrassing to municipal government in those counties where, through urban develop ment, the vast majority of the electors are also electors of one city. Side by side with the in crease in the complexity of the activities of the city, the expensiveness and political im portance of county government grow. The re sult is a duplicate system of local government, with extravagant expenses and no end of polit ical interference. Under these circumstances, movements have taken place in many of the States for the consolidation of city and county governments wherever large cities have sprung up. Wherever this consolidation has been established the county functions have been taken over by the city government and thus the city, in a sense, has been taken out of the regu lar administrative organization applying to other portions of the State. The most notable instances in which this consolidation of city and county government has been partially or completely established are New York City (which includes five counties whose affairs are partly under the jurisdiction of the central board of estimate and apportionment and partly still conducted by county administrative offi cials), Philadelphia, Saint Louis, Baltimore, San Francisco and Denver. In Virginia all the cities, large and small, are separate from and independent of the counties within which they are located.