clamor, with a tendency to give the victory to that one of the factions whose managers are most artful, impudent and mendacious. In the _American Popular Science Review_, February, 1918, p. 121, Edgar Dawson, speaking of the election of a city mayor, an office which under any rational system is treated as administrative, says: “Does it require argument to prove to thoughtful people that wise choice is not likely to be made in the midst of the revel of hysteria, sham, demagogy, falsehood and ignorance, which we call a direct popular election of administrative officers? Is choice likely to be wise when nine out of ten of those who make it know nothing of the candidates they support or oppose, and are equally ignorant of the work the candidates ask the privilege of doing?” Thus arises a question difficult to decide, between appointments by a machine, and those of a machine-directed populace. The immense importance of scientific management of cities is so obvious as not to need discussion. It is set forth in detail in a book published in 1918 by M. L. Cooke, Director of Public Works in Philadelphia, to which the reader is referred. The author states that “Governmental work, Federal, State and Municipal, is still almost exclusively in the unsystematized stage.” Here is an extract from a competent writer, a man of actual experience in city matters: “_When the Public Builds Buildings._ Twenty-seven million dollars for a City Hall that was to have cost $7,000,000; no water on the second floor of a public bath because the water mains were made too small; an emergency order, without competitive bids, for repairing a police precinct, given to a contractor sixteen miles away; $20,000 for cleaning a City Hall that could be kept clean for $2,000; fifteen employees dead from tuberculosis in one germ-infested, dark, unclean room. What’s the use of multiplying examples?” (_Woman’s Part in Government_, by W. H. p. 330.)