believe to-day that you can find out as to the inferior courts what the judge's record is; there is no means of knowing. We have simply given them that notion of personal independence without the notion of personal responsibility. The principle of personal responsibility is the idea which is back of the organization of the courts.

Judge McAdoo has told you about the organization of his court and the effect of this new law which is likely to add greatly to its usefulness and importance. At this same session of the legislature, another bill was passed to reorganize the civil court which corresponds in a way to Judge McAdoo's criminal court. By it the lowest of our civil courts, the municipal court, has been theoretically reorganized, but the organization did not proceed upon an intelligent plan of coordinating into a centralized system this municipal court, which has forty-six judges spread into twenty-four districts in six counties. It has the thing which Judge McAdoo's court escaped from, a sort of board of judges who get together and elect somebody as a presiding officer who can do what the board tells him he may do, and that is very little. There is no centralized authority at all, no chief justice, no chief clerk, no means of control over the multitudinous class of civil or generally uraivil employes which you find in all these courts in the clerical depar ment; the clerks, the attendants and the interpreters. The clerk in a municipal court, if he misbehaves, can be removed by the judges who are elected in the district in which that clerk's office is located, but the law also says that no judge shall stay for two months in the same district, so these jumping judges who go from one part of the city to another are supposed to supervise as they go along the general administration of the miscellaneous courts through which they pass. How much of an administrative organization can you expect from a court which is chaos personified in this fashion? Obviously none.

Certain features of that new municipal court act are doubtless good, but they are the old-line features. There are changes in jurisdiction, changes in procedure and putting other patches on various parts of the court organization which appealed to lawyers, but which do not effect anything substantial. You can't patch courts together. They have got to be reorganized. We began without any organization; we have gone for one hundred and fifty years without anything that remotely resembles organization, and until the time comes when a sufficient amount of public opinion comes from outside-I am talking now not about the lawyer but about the layman-until such time as the intelligent and efficient business man in this city and state realizes that it is something in which he is interested we shall not make any very serious changes in the courts.

Eight million eight hundred and sixty thousand dollars is what the courts cost in this city last year-a pretty fairly heavy bill. If that money has been wasted to a large extent, if it has gone to pay a great mass of absolutely unnecessary salaries which the legislature has put into the so-called judiciary act, if this has been done simply to furnish additional and wasteful jobs, it is a matter which should interest not merely the legal profession but every taxpayer and every citizen of New York. Fundamentally, we must have responsibility; as much judicial independence as is consistent with judicial responsibility, and judicial responsibility created by an organization to which the judge is amenable and which is capable of criticizing his work from within instead of leaving it to the newspapers outside. You never can expect to get any blunderbuss in the form of a recall or in the form of an impeachment which is likely to do the judiciary much good. The criticism has to be a selfcriticism from within, as in the municipal court of Chicago, where the chief justice has some measure of actual control over the associate judges. He can tranfer the judges where he pleases. If he finds a man is not up to his job and is not performing his duty properly, he can put him in some very unimportant portion of the machinery of things, which is an effective discipline. He can keep those judges "on their toes" for efficiency. Not so in New York. The so-called presiding justice of the municipal court, under this new law which is supposed to represent a great advance, cannot even transfer a judge from one borough to another, from a borough where he is not working to a borough where more judges are badly wanted, unless the judge consents to being transferred.

The municipal court of Chicago now tries annually more cases and they result in judgments for a larger sum of money than does the High Court of Justice in England. That court was less than ten years ago a scandalous court composed of miscellaneous justices of the peace who did not do their work properly or honestly; but by organization, by having a good chief justice at the head of it, a transformation has taken place in the municipal court there on the civil side comparable with that which has taken place on the criminal side under Chief Magistrate McAdoo here in New York. This administrative idea, this organization of courts is a tremendously important thing. It is new and we ought to interest ourselves in it. The associations like the American Judicature Society which are taking it up ought to have the co-operation not only of lawyers but of laymen as well, because it is not merely a law question; it is a question of business organization and it is fundamentally the most effective way to get speedy and certain justice.

I

THE CITY CHARTER

GEORGE MCANENY

President of the Board of Aldermen

ASSUME that in the earlier numbers of this course the detail

of the present city government has been pretty thoroughly covered. You have been told about the operation of various departments and their correlation, and about the organization of the city's finances. You are still to hear from the mayor upon the development of the port and terminal facilities of the city. What I have to say, therefore, about the charter, fundamental though the subject be, will touch but lightly upon these questions of detail. I wish, rather, to impress you with the fact that we have indeed reached the opportune time at which a new and up-to-date instrument of government for the whole city may be framed and put into effect. We have had ill luck in the past in bringing anything like this about. When the various municipalities were consolidated into Greater New York in 1897, the charter then drawn did little more than put together the old fragments of law that belonged to one city or another, making them as nearly applicable to the whole as possible. The commission to which Dr. Butler was called corrected those mistakes that were developed during the earlier years of actual administration under the Greater New York charter, and in 1900 the revision under which we are now working was given to us by the legislature. There have been several attempts since to draw a charter that would not merely put together the old things by scissor and gum-pot work, but would draw a new and broad body of law to serve, as it ought to serve, as a constitution for the government of our six millions of people, giving incidentally to the city that larger measure of control of its own affairs that it ought to have, simplifying its working machinery and working out various improvements of detail that experience has suggested.

In 1907, I think, Governor Hughes appointed a commission upon which I had the honor to serve, a commission of fifteen men, and we prepared what seemed to us an excellent plan. We sent

it to Albany, and there it died. Then came two successive commissions appointed by the legislature and not by the governor, and made up in part of gentlemen from up-state, in part of our own citizens. Both charters framed in this manner failed in turn. We have a new commission now. I am the lineal successor of Dr. Butler in what he would have been in serving as chairman of that commission; but this time the initiative has been taken by the city. We have brought together a body of our own officers, eight of them, and propose to associate with ourselves seven citizens, who are about to be appointed, to frame a charter offered by the city to its own people, made up here and not through the indirection of action at Albany if we can avoid that. We have deliberately held back the real beginning of our drafting until the constitutional convention should begin its work, so that we may work side by side with its members through the summer, gathering as we go along a notion of what they propose to do, of how much power they propose to give us or to permit the people to give us, and shaping our plans accordingly.

In the convention, there will be no other question so lively, so important, perhaps even so exciting, as this one. The question

of home rule for cities has never been in a livelier state and there never has been a time at which we might more reasonably hope for concessions from the state that would be of great and lasting importance to us. It is not merely the case of New York city that is presented, but that of every city in the state, for we are still governed far too much from Albany.

When the constitution of twenty years ago was framed, or before that time, conditions indeed were considerably worse. We ran to Albany for authority to spend fifty thousand dollars upon a Brooklyn turnpike, for instance. We ran to Albany to change the provisions of law with relation to the fixing of salaries for almost every grade and description of city employes. We were in turn governed from Albany, without request, in many matters that bothered us a good deal. But the convention of that year appointed a select committee on home rule for cities. That committee procured the passage of important amendments. In consequence, municipal elections are now held at a separate time from the elections for state and national officials. The mayor of

the city was also given power to veto a bill affecting the city, and even though his veto may be overridden by the same vote that passed the original bill in the legislature, the moral effect of such an objection has, of course, been real and serviceable. In various other respects the home-rule powers of the cities were increased, and as the legislature was put under greater curb as to the manner of doing its own work, providing more opportunity for examination of bills, and requiring printing in advance of consideration, the city has had a much better chance to protect itself than it had before. But there is still far too much interference.

New York city is, of course, in a class absolutely by itself. In its population and in its wealth it is not merely a city; in its relation to the rest of the country, it is really a great commonwealth, ranking in number of people third, I think, with only Pennsylvania and Illinois ahead of it; in wealth far passing any of them. Our problems are peculiar to a city of this sort. We share but few problems with the smaller cities of the state. We are clearly entitled to an unusual degree of home rule. It seems absurd that in affairs affecting so great an aggregation of people, affecting the annual spending of so many millions of dollars, decisions should be made by a legislature sitting a hundred and fifty miles away in which, moreover, we have actually a minority representation. We have 55% of the people of the state; we have about 42% of the representation in the legislature. That convention of twenty years ago deliberately provided that at no time should our representation go beyond one half. Therefore, as I say, those who live outside the city, who must at best understand our affairs far less clearly than we do ourselves, are given the power of decision in matters that affect the spending of millions of dollars annually from the city treasury and the detailed regulation of the day to day conduct of our people. Our government, as it stands, is quite capable of taking over a larger measure of local self-control. As it would be improved under a new charter, it will be even more capable of doing this thing.

Before I get into the question of what I think we ought to have, may I sketch very briefly the present system? Being peculiar as a