popular elective origin. All that, however, is consistent enough with the Napoleonic conception of the true method of democratic government. Napoleon, with his ministers of state, never claimed to exercise such control over the _Corps Législatif_ as the Mayor of Greater New York will exercise over his elective assembly. He is allowed a free hand to appoint his own executive, and he can pass his own budget, so long as he can find one-sixth, plus one, of the Assembly to support him. The creation of the Tsar-Mayor, however interesting as indicative of the rooted distrust of elective assemblies which is supreme at present in the American mind, is not the feature of the Charter which reveals most deeply how far the distrust of popular government has gone in the United States. For, after giving the Mayor supreme responsibility, and electing him for a term of four years, these astonishing charter-makers carefully provide that he shall only have a right to remove the commissioners, whom he has been allowed to appoint, during the first six months of his term of office. It is this limitation which shows how thoroughly the modern American distrusts his governing men. Faith in an elective council has perished utterly; but faith in a Tsar-Mayor might have shown the survival of some faith in the elective principle. But the stipulation carefully made in the Charter that the Mayor’s right to remove the heads of departments whom he has nominated shall cease six months after his election, is the most astounding illustration yet afforded of the deep-rooted distrust which the American of to-day has in all elected men. Ex-Mayor Grace, writing after much experience of the working of city governments, declared:-- The absolute power of removal as well as of appointment of all commissioners and heads of departments should be vested in the mayor, the power of removal to be subject to no check beyond that of filing the reasons for such removals--expressed in writing. Mr. Seth Low, the first Tsar-Mayor of Brooklyn, and Mr. Strong, the Mayor of the Reform Administration in New York, both declared, in a supplementary report, their conviction that the authority given to the Mayor to make appointments without confirmation ought to carry with it, as a matter of course, the authority to make removals in the public interest without charges at any time. Their protests, however, were overruled. The majority dare not trust the Mayor with such powers. The result is that “for three years and six months the government of the City of New York will be carried on by eighteen separate departments, not one of which is directly responsible or accountable to anybody. They do not derive authority directly from the people, and they certainly owe nothing to the Municipal Assembly. On the other hand, there is no power in the Mayor to hold them accountable.” Says Dr. Shaw:--