And so it is with the complaint that a commission of five members is not large enough to be representative of all classes among the people. Good representation is not merely a matter of numbers. Large bodies, in fact, can be easily handled by bosses. Congress with more than five hundred members has sometimes failed to reflect public opinion; the President on occasions has done this much better. Five men can find out what the people want just as well as fifty, and they are more likely to try. Quite as much to the point—they are in a better position to carry out the people’s wishes when the time comes. [Sidenote: The most serious fault.] There is one serious defect in the commission plan, however, and it is this: The control of the various city departments is not brought to a single center but is parceled out into five separate hands. Each commissioner looks after a certain portion of the city’s business; no one is supreme over them all. The commission as a whole is supreme, it is true, but it must trust its own individual members to handle their own branches of work. In other words, the commission plan establishes a five-headed executive; it leaves room for disagreements among the commissioners on a three-against-two basis, and does not make some one man responsible for getting a dollar’s worth of value for every hundred cents expended. Dividing the responsibility among five men is better, of course, than dividing it among fifty or sixty, as the mayor-and-council plan does; but putting it all upon the shoulders of one man is more effective still. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE CITY-MANAGER PLAN The diagram which is printed on the reverse of this page will make clear the analogy between the organization of a business corporation and that of a city in which the city-manager plan of government is followed. The people of the city correspond to the stockholders of the corporation in that they possess the ultimate power. This power is exercised in the one case through a board of directors, in the other through a council or commission. Administrative authority, however, in both cases devolves upon a manager, who, in turn, appoints and removes his subordinates. All the activities of corporate business and of city-manager government are linked together or correlated at a single administrative center. This diagram should be studied in connection with the discussion on pages 203-206. A COMPARISON THE FACTORY THE CITY STOCKHOLDERS PEOPLE Vote Initiative, Referendum, Recall, Protest