should not be a candidate for the Presidency, the agreement of all parties to abide by the result of the election, and the support of the administration chosen by the power of the United States. The offer was rejected by Huerta. Yet so determined was President Wilson that the Mexican people should work out their own problem that not even the embargo on the exportation of arms from this country was lifted until the Constitutionalists had shown what they could accomplish by winning the whole of northern Mexico to their cause. Obregon and Villa defeated one Huerta army after another, while Zapata continually threatened from the south. Finally, in his desperation, Huerta made his appeal to Mexican patriotism by picking a quarrel with the United States. The arrest of American sailors in uniform, protected by the American flag flying from their boat, was the culmination of a series of insults by a responsible authority. Accordingly, President Wilson backed up the demand made by Admiral Mayo for the salute to the flag, ordered the fleet to Vera Cruz, and requested authority from Congress to use the army and navy " in such ways and to such an extent as may be necessary to obtain from General Huerta and his adherents the fullest recognition of the rights and dignity of the United States, even amid the distressing conditions now unhappily obtaining in Mexico." The House promptly passed the necessary resolution. While the Senate was debating the Lodge substitute, ably supported by Senator Root, the adoption of which substitute would infallibly have meant war with all Mexico, the news came of the arrival at Vera Cruz of the German merchant vessel Ypiranga, with 250 machine guns and 2,000,000 rounds of ammunition on board for our prospective enemies. The President immediately ordered the seizure of Vera Cruz, at the cost of the lives of nineteen marines and some two hundred Mexicans. But the Vera Cruz custom-house was the chief source of revenue for Huerta, and the collection of the import taxes by the American authorities was as fatal to him as would have been the march upon Mexico City. Yet the childish assertion is still occasionally heard that we went to war with Huerta to obtain a salute to the flag and failed to obtain it.

4. The A B C Mediation.

And next the miracle was wrought which stopped an invasion of Mexican soil followed by the shedding of blood, without involving us in war with the Mexican people.

No matter who conceived the plan, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, representing Latin America, offered to mediate between the Mexican factions and the United States, and the Niagara Conference was held, with farreaching consequences of good will and of confidence re-established between Latin America and English America. The immediate consequence for Mexico was the restriction of American occupation to Vera Cruz. But Huerta was not able to maintain himself in power, the Ypiranga was allowed to unload at Puerto Mexico too late to save him, and not long afterwards he sailed away to Europe from the same port, and Carranza entered the capital in triumph.

5. Evacuation of Vera Cruz.

The revolution now began to "devour its own children." Carranza had long been suspicious of Villa, and Villa rebellious at the exercise of any authority over him by the First Chief. He remained in his Department of the North, recruiting his army, when Carranza marched with Obregon into Mexico City. A convention was called at the capital, but it lacked representatives from the armies of Villa and Zapata, and, finding itself under the domination of Carranza, adjourned to Aguas Calientes, where it fell under the control of Villa,, whose representatives, with those of Zapata, formed a majority of all. The convention unconditionally accepted the resignation of Carranza as First Chief, made conditionally, elected a Provisional President, and adjourned to Mexico City, which Carranza had left after stripping it of its defenses. Villa entered in triumph December 6, 1914, and for the week following reveled in an orgy of lust and blood, proving himself impossible as the head of the Government. President Wilson, with extraordinary insight and foresight, delivered Vera Cruz, with its precious revenues, to the nearest Carranza general. With Vera Cruz retained by the American army, Carranza would soon have been at the mercy of Villa, made Commander-in-Chief by his complacent convention. But with the aid of his still loyal officers, Obregon and Pablo Gonzales, and the Vera Cruz custom-house, Carranza slowly won back the territory he had lost until Obregon defeated Villa in a decisive battle, Villa retiring to the States of the north. 6. Recognition of Carranza.

With affairs apparently at a deadlock as between Villa and Carranza, with talk of the division of Mexico into northern and south

POLITICAL CENSORSHIP

On one occasion the head of the Bureau, a prominent lawyer, issued a painfully specific statement regarding the excessive cost of certain books, ledgers, etc., which the county had purchased. There were 110 big indexes worth $20 each, for example, which had been billed to the county at $81.45; hundreds of others worth $6 for which $36 had been paid, and so on. Apparently this statement got on the nerves of the men who were bossing the county business, so they caused a suit for libel to be brought against the lawyer and the New York" Evening Post," which had published his statements. The sixty-six little newspapers with which Westchester County is cursed heralded the approach of the trial with noisy satisfaction. The fair name of "our beautiful county" was to be upheld! This slinger of mud would learn to his cost that he must not make such statements! Westchester County at last read the news that to-day this offensive citizen was to be haled into court to answer for his libel. Then abruptly there was silence Only three of the sixty-six papers in Westchester published the results of that trial, and one of them reversed the facts!

The political machines not only control the press, but the public furnishes the money with which to finance the operation.

Westchester County expends each year over one hundred thousand dollars for the publication of political piffle at an exorbitant

rate.

If there were not so much velvet in this advertising, some of the newspapers no doubt could afford to kick over the traces and set themselves up as a real free press for the enlightenment of the public on county affairs, but it would be pretty hard for such a paper to live when the county is so liberally financing its rival. There was, in fact, one editor in Westchester who received his slice of the county advertising and proceeded to render his bill for it at a fair rate. The other publishers heard of this with dismay and went around to reason with him. He was very stubborn. 6: 'No,” he said; "that is the legal rate, and, what is more, it is exceedingly good pay." It was explained to him patiently that the county could not very well pay him at that low rate and pay all the other papers at a higher rate; but the editor insisted on spilling the beans, so all the other papers had to suffer the cutting of their bills to the low rate also, to the great regret of all concerned except the recalcitrant editor, who for some strange

reason has never received any advertising from the county since then.

SUBSIDIZING THE PRESS

By a little intelligent management these subsidies to the press may often be jockeyed up into quite handsome figures. In Suffolk County, for instance, out at the end of Long Island, certain sandy wastes had been marked off in building lots and sold to distant credulous investors as suburban property. When the swindle had run its course, these useless lands were abandoned by their owners, and in the course of time they had to be sold for taxes. A few brief notices of the sale would have described the parcels sufficiently for all legal and practical purposes, but the county politicians arranged for a separate notice for each lot, thus running up an enormous series of notices, for which the newspapers rendered bills totaling $108,000, a handsome advertising appropriation, considering that it was for the purpose of collecting, if possible, the sum of $34,000 of accrued taxes.

Very little of this public advertising is of any value except to the newspapers that print it. It does not advertise. How utterly useless it may be is illustrated by the fact that corporations when desiring to keep a cranky minority stockholder from making trouble at the annual stockholders' meetings will exercise the option allowed to them by the law and, instead of mailing a letter to the stockholder, will "advertise" their annual meeting in order to conceal it from him. Such a notice is as safe from observation as the proverbial needle in the haystack.

66

Various cities save most of such money through the publication by the city itself of a City Record," into which all such notices, so far as the laws permit, are inexpensively put ; but a county gazette is far, far away. Charles E. Hughes has about as much backbone as any Governor ever had, but when it was suggested that he take steps to abolish the printing of the session laws in all the counties of the State it is reported that he smiled sadly and affirmed that there were some things which even he would not venture to tackle unless he was prepared to sacrifice his whole legislative programme.

Ofttimes little papers are published solely for the purpose of getting this public advertising. Certainly it is an important asset to any paper. The honest rural editor gets a meager living out of his little weekly, but a county politician can come along, buy the

paper from him, and make a very much better living from it. The publisher can very well afford to make the county boss a present of a nice block of stock or to run free of charge the advertisement of the boss's private business if he gets this public advertising.

So it comes about that the first practical steps toward the reform of county politics must usually take the shape of an attempt to buy the control of a newspaper and run it uncontaminated by public advertising patronage-a highly precarious business venture.

BEHIND THE CENSORSHIP

Now let us lift a corner of this blanket of silence that covers county government and see what we find. The Comptroller of the State of New York has power to send examiners to any county to investigate and report upon its financial methods. The law was a dead letter until Mr. Glynn, afterwards Governor, became Comptroller and secured an appropriation for the salaries of a few examiners. They had no difficulty in finding wanton use of the taxpayers' money in nearly every county, not with criminal intent, to be sure, but in a spirit of simple recklessness. They found irregularities in every county. They have now covered fifty-seven of them, and the head of the staff says: "In not a single county examined has there been found compliance with every provision of law."

In Broome County the county boss had so manipulated things that he was able to draw upon the county's funds for his private benefit whenever he pleased, and he pleased rather often. The unexpected visit of the Comptroller's examiners caught him with a large shortage and he committed suicide. The impression which the event made upon the people of Broome County was probably quite fairly expressed by his successor in office, who stood before a committee of the Constitutional Convention not long after and asserted that there was no popular unrest in Broome nor any desire to change the system!

Graft in county government is just as oldfashioned as county government itself, just as much behind the times, just as lacking in modern refinement. When you enter county politics, you step back into the days of Tweed. If you protest at things you find, you get the same answer, "What are you going to do about it?" And there isn't much you can do.

When a committee of citizens ventured to ask the treasurer of Cook County, Illinois, to let them see whether the county was get

ting all the interest it should on his balances of $10,000,000 (little details like this not being made public), he refused. They tried to find out what they could do about it, and ended up by publishing a pamphlet. When the treasurer's term finally expired, they easily obtained signed and detailed promises of reforms from all the thirteen new candidates for this post. The winner, the present incumbent, was especially conciliatory. His zeal seems to have petered out, for he fought off a proposed law to make him keep his pledge by getting it amended so as not to take effect until after his term expires in 1918, and he did not let the public into his precious secret at the end of 1915.

In 1910 the State examiners went through the affairs of a certain county in the Hudson River district, New York, and reported that the county treasurer was keeping certain fees that belonged to the county. When they came around again in 1914, they found that their 1910 report had not disturbed anybody sufficiently to prevent several thousand dollars more from going the same way.

In one such case in another county the supervisors loyally voted to the incriminated officer his regular salary of $10,000 "plus such sums as he may have illegally taken in the past."

Which shows what you can do about it if you try!

ANTIQUATED STANDARDS

The work of the county has become expert work. In the simple days of our grandfathers a man of common horse sense could run an almshouse or a county jail or a taxcollector's office or build a road, and easily achieve the primitive standards of those times.

Nowadays the proper care of the unfortunates in an almshouse, for instance, is a highly specialized and technical profession. Men and women train for such duties in special schools and make it their life-work. Even such trained social workers will find an almshouse full of unsolved human problems requiring the most elaborate study, though the honest village merchant who takes for a few years the position of superintendent of the poor would not recognize the existence of any problems at all. The untrained visitor to an almshouse sees a clean and airy building containing a varied assortment of unfortunate humanity who are being well fed and kindly treated, and he goes away with a feeling that the county administration is excellent. The

social worker, however, observes epileptics without scientific care, undetected cases of feeble-mindedness, inebriates and drug victims who are not being trained out of their habits, victims of tuberculosis without the special system of treatment which their cases require, sufferers from chronic diseases, such as heart cases, rheumatism, cancer, and the more sinister ills, cripples who could be taught a trade if there were anybody available who knew how to teach them, and aged poor whose relatives have never been adequately looked up, the system for admissions being so lax that practically the county supports any one who applies.

All this is not the fault of the superintendent of the poor; it is the reasonable result of a ramshackle system of government. The superintendent is elective; that guarantees that he will not be an expert, but a local and transient amateur. He is forbidden to use his common sense by the Legislature, which, in its complicated poor law, provides written rules for every contigency, with results that may often be pathetic or ludicrous. Admissions to the almshouse are governed by the easy personal standards of a dozen to ten dozen local officers scattered around the county, the justices of the peace and the overseers of the poor, who have authority to commit to the almshouse. The money to operate the almshouse properly must be solicited from the Board of Supervisors, who, if they choose to make offhand slashes in the requested appropriation, take no responsibility for the results.

AMATEUR PENOLOGY

Or take the sheriff's office. Did you ever hear of a sheriff who was a penologist? So the typical county jail is a horror, a school for crime and unnatural sexual vices where men who are innocent, or at least not vicious, cannot possibly remain without becoming contaminated or callous to things that at the beginning of their incarceration they find revolting. At Utica a recent scandal brought the sheriff's office into the courts, where it was learned that the jail had seen scenes of open debauchery with women prisoners, officers of the jail, and friends of the latter from outside.

The sheriff is commonly compensated by fees. This still survives even in New York County, where the fees net the sheriff $60,000 a year in addition to the comfortable salary of $12,000. Efforts are made from time to time to amend the law and steer these fees

into the treasury, but there is no assurance that the plan would work. Hudson County, New Jersey, tried that, and, instead of deriving a nice revenue from the sheriff's office, the county acquired an annual deficit, for patronage multiplied and thrift declined when the fruits of economy were no longer the sheriff's private perquisites.

COUNTY BOUNDARIES

Cities change their boundaries incessantly to keep in correct adjustment with shifts of population, but county boundaries remain immutable as they were a hundred years ago, except when one county is divided into two in order to make an extra set of jobs. That is the way Bronx County was erected within the boundaries of the County of New York. Bronx set up in business separately at a new expense of $700,000 a year, but the expenses of the remaining half of the county have continued undiminished.

The most offhand study of the county map in any State will disclose many misfits. The county seat is often remote from the center of the county, perhaps down in one corner. Often it is in a little village far from the main routes of modern transportation. Sometimes the county will straddle a mountain range or will in other ways attempt to ignore topography. In numberless cases the counties are too small in size or in population to be economical and could save a large part of their annual expenses by consolidation. Yet it never seems to occur to anybody to work for a readjustment and modernization of county geography.

MISFIT UNIFORMITY

The same spirit of complacent stagnation permits the inflexible framework of government which took its present shape amid the simple conditions of seventy years ago to remain uniform for all kinds and shapes of counties, regardless of differing conditions. One great county has a trifling population scattered over an immense territory, another county may consist of a compact group of little villages, a third will be co-extensive with a city government, while another is half metropolitan and half rural, and the framework of county government is identical for all of them.

Any form of organization which attempts to be a common denominator for so many different types of counties ought to be primitively simple, a mere skeleton, and a model