in France.  They all came to the same end.  Says Madison, in No.  XLVII of The Federalist:  “The accumulation of all powers, legislative and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”  Mr. justice Story said, “Whenever these departments are all vested in one person or body of men, the government is in fact a despotism, by whatever name it be called, whether a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a democracy.”

d.  The procedure of Berlin has in it an element of fairness worthy of our consideration; those representing large property interests have a surety of being at least represented.  Some such system must be devised if the holding of properly at all be regarded as moral and necessary to our civilization.  Remember that you are, in a large sense, but a chartered joint-stock corporation.  Can you imagine the control of any other joint-stock corporation delivered over to those who have no stock or the least stock in it?  Can you imagine the New York & New Haven Railroad, for example, controlled by the passengers, to the exclusion of the stock holders?  Now this, to a very great degree, is what has happened in many of our cities.  We have deprived the true stockholders, in some cases, of any representation whatever.  I thus hold that to give property some voice in the control of a municipal corporation is but sense and justice.

e.  We have tried commissions in Buffalo in branches of our city government.  They have tried them in nearly every city in this country.  We have governed our police by commissions, our parks by commissions, our public works by commissions.  Commission government was for many years a fad in this country, and it has become discredited, so that of late we have been doing away with commissions and coming to single heads for departments having executive functions and some minor legislative functions, such as park boards, and police boards, and have been trying to concentrate responsibility in that way.  In Erie County and throughout New York a commission elected by the people governs our counties.  The board of supervisors is a commission government.  It has never been creditable—­always bad, even as compared with our city governments.  To be sure, it is not just that kind of commission government.  It is a larger commission; it is not elected at large, but by districts, but it is an attempt at the same thing.  So I say there is nothing new about this idea of government by a commission.

CHAPTER IV

THE ARGUMENT WRITTEN OUT