This Charter first came into effect in January, 1882, and Brooklyn has been governed by Tsar-Mayors ever since. Mr. Seth Low, who was the first Tsar-Mayor in America, and who subsequently served a second time, claims for it the virtues and vices of all despotisms. When you have a good Tsar, nothing can be better. When you have a bad Tsar, nothing can be worse. As he says, the Brooklyn system “made clear to the simplest citizen that the entire character of the city government depends upon the man chosen for the office of Mayor.” It is, of course, playing double or quits. If you get a good man, his immense power enables him to be potent for good, but if you get a bad one, Heaven help the city! The Brooklyn system was adopted with modification in several towns, notably in Cleveland, in Cincinnati, and to a certain extent in Philadelphia. The same system was carried out to its ultimate extreme in the Charter of the City of Quincy, in Massachusetts. Mr. Gamaliel Bradford, of Boston, in the May number of the _Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science_ for 1893, thus explained the evolution of the Tsar-Mayor as it could be seen in the Quincy Charter:-- It was provided that the mayor should be the only executive official elected at all, and he by general vote of the city, so that he might be the embodiment of the whole administration and responsible for it. That he might be this, he was given the full power of appointment and removal of all subordinates except the school committee, as to whom even the radical framers of the charter shrank from encountering the popular prejudice. It was held that the separate election of officials, whether by popular vote or that of the council, is destructive of all subordination, of all firm or efficient administration, and of all personal responsibility. But the Quincy charter ran counter to another prejudice much more deeply rooted: the requirement of confirmation of the mayor’s appointments by the council or aldermen.