San Francisco, as the citizens of every American city, like to drink pure water?  Don’t they desire good transportation facilities, and aren’t they glad when they have clean streets and honest administration?  Why, then, don’t the gentlemen come forward, as the Affirmative has done, with a specific form of organization which provides for the successful administration of the underlying features of city government?  Instead, the gentlemen seem to delight in wandering across the seas, telling what might happen if we would be indulgent enough to pattern our form of organization after that of France, Germany, or Bohemia.  Yet they glibly refuse to consider that the city problem of this country is distinctly American and is due to conditions peculiar to America.

As a matter of fact, the gentlemen have held before us the salient features of a half dozen opposing forms of organization, none of which have succeeded individually, and the combined features of which can make nothing more than a conglomeration of theories and dogmas.  Yes, the gentlemen have been painfully careful not to put their scheme into practical operation.

They talk blandly of more home rule, when it is evident that such a matter is actually beside the question at issue.  In the same way they speak at length of the cabinet system of England, forgetting that the form the Affirmative is advocating involves the underlying features of the cabinet system altered to meet conditions peculiar to America.  The commission form, Honorable Judges, is an evolution of the cabinet form.

Likewise they have talked much of the need for a separate reviewing body, citing the insurance scandals of New York state legislature to prove their contention.  Why don’t they give instances where a municipal reviewing body has checked fraud?  The reason is obvious.  As Henry Baldwin writes, “Never has there been an instance in American municipal history where the council has stood out against the corruption of the administrative department.”  Rather these so-called “reviewing bodies” are hand in hand with graft.  Look at the shameful conditions of the “reviewing bodies” of Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, with their hands in the city treasury up to their elbows, and we realize something of the absurdity of the argument for a separate reviewing body to preserve efficiency and honesty in the city government.  The people should be the reviewing body of their government.  Its organization should be so simple, yet so complete, that every citizen from the educated theorist to the humblest day laborer, can review its facts with ease and understanding.  This is the kind of government the commission form supplies.  Why don’t the gentlemen come forward with an organization equally as simple and complete?

Then the gentlemen go on to tell how they will compel the administrative officials to confer with their isolated “reviewing body,”