Gradually the towns awoke to their newer needs and demanded public service--lighting, street cleaning, fire protection, public education. All these matters, however, could be easily looked after by the mayor and the council committees. But when these towns began to spread rapidly into cities, they quickly outgrew their colonial garments. Yet the legislatures were loath to cast the old garments aside. One may say that from 1840 to 1901, when the Galveston plan of commission government was inaugurated, American municipal government was nothing but a series of contests between a small body of alert citizens attempting to fix responsibility on public officers and a few adroit politicians attempting to elude responsibility; both sides appealing to an electorate which was habitually somnolent but subject to intermittent awakenings through spasms of righteousness. During this epoch no important city remained immune from ruthless legislative interference. Year after year the legislature shifted officers and responsibilities at the behest of the boss. "Ripper bills" were passed, tearing up the entire administrative systems of important municipalities. The city was made the plaything of the boss and the machine. Throughout the constant shifts that our city governments have undergone one may, however, discern three general plans of government. The first was the centering of power in the city council, whether composed of two chambers--a board of aldermen and a common council--as in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, or of one council, as in many lesser cities. It soon became apparent that a large body, whose chief function is legislation, is utterly unfit to look after administrative details. Such a body, in order to do business, must act through committees. Responsibility is scattered. Favoritism is possible in letting contracts, in making appointments, in depositing city funds, in making public improvements, in purchasing supplies and real estate, and in a thousand other ways. So, by controlling the appointment of committees, a shrewd manipulator could virtually control all the municipal activities and make himself overlord of the city. The second plan of government attempted to make the mayor the controlling force. It reduced the council to a legislative body and exalted the mayor into a real executive with power to appoint and to remove heads of departments, thereby making him responsible for the city administration. Brooklyn under Mayor Seth Low was an encouraging example of this type of government. But the type was rarely found in a pure form. The politician succeeded either in electing a subservient mayor or in curtailing the mayor's authority by having the heads of departments elected or appointed by the council or made subject to the approval of the council. If the council held the key to the city treasury, the boss reigned, for councilmen from properly gerrymandered wards could usually be trusted to execute his will.