The chief defect of the mayor-and-council plan is its unwieldiness. There are too many separate authorities. Power and responsibility are scattered into too many hands. When things go wrong the council blames the mayor; the mayor blames the council; the voters do not know who is at fault. Time is wasted and money is misspent because independent authorities fail to agree. The political bosses take advantage of this situation to gain their own ends by helping one side or the other. The citizen who tries to find out the real facts has a hard time of it. It is like threading his way through a jungle. When he has a complaint to make he is often referred from one official to another until he loses patience. In the largest cities the mayor-and-council plan does not operate so badly, because the methods of conducting business are more definitely prescribed and the mayor is given so much power that he cannot well evade the responsibility. It is in the smaller communities that this plan of government obtains the least satisfactory results. [Sidenote: How commission government began.] =The Commission Plan.=—Twenty-five years ago it seemed impossible to secure any substantial improvement in the administration of American cities. Foreign observers spoke of city government as a “conspicuous failure”, and there was a good deal of basis for that statement. People realized that city government had become cumbrous and top-heavy. They saw that the system of checks and balances, whatever its merits in state and national government, was not working well in the cities. Yet they had grown so accustomed to the complicated network of officials, boards, and councils that they hesitated to sweep the whole thing away in order to put some simple form of government in its place. So things drifted along until 1901, when the city of Galveston, driven to heroic measures as the result of a catastrophe, installed an entirely new scheme of government known as the commission plan.[74] The success of this experiment was so marked that other cities became interested and followed Galveston’s example, until today the commission plan has been established in nearly four hundred municipalities, scattered all over the country.[75] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE COMMISSION PLAN