=The Commission Plan of Government.=--The increasing dissatisfaction with the government of our cities by mayor and councils has recently led a number of cities to abandon the system for a new method known as the commission plan. The principal feature of this method is that all the powers of government heretofore exercised by the mayor and council are intrusted to a small commission usually chosen from the city at large. The plan was first put into operation in the city of Galveston after the great storm of 1900 which destroyed the lives of some 6,000 of its citizens and left the city in a condition of bankruptcy. Under the new charter which was adopted, practically all the powers of government were vested in a mayor and four commissioners, each of these men being put in charge of one of the five departments into which the administrative service was divided. _Merits._--Several advantages are claimed for this plan of municipal government. In the first place, it does away with the evils of the ward system by providing that the commissioners shall be chosen from the city at large, and this tends to secure the election of men of larger ability. Again, it is argued that a small body of men is better fitted to govern a city than a large council composed of members who consider themselves the special representatives of the petty districts from which they are chosen. The affairs of a city are necessarily complex and often technical in nature and require for their special management skill and efficiency. City government is often compared to the management of a business enterprise like a bank or a manufacturing concern, which, as experience has shown, can be better conducted by a small board of directors than by the whole body of stockholders. Finally, the concentration of the powers of the city in a small body of men tends to secure a more effective responsibility than can be secured under a system in which the responsibility is divided between the mayor and council. _Objections._--The chief objections that have been urged against the commission plan are that, by intrusting both the legislative and the executive power to the same hands, it sacrifices the principle of the separation of powers--a principle long cherished in America. In the second place, by doing away with the council, it sacrifices to a certain extent the representative principle and places all the vast powers of the city in the hands of a few men. Nevertheless, the system has much to commend it, and it has been adopted in about four hundred towns and cities.