And so, county government everywhere was conceived in a spirit of negation. The people elect their boards of supervisors or county commissioners, hoping thereby to keep their fingers on the public purse through direct agents. The supervisors, in their turn, undertake to regulate the finances of the sheriff, the district attorney, the county clerk and the rest. But, lo, these officers are no subordinates of theirs; they are the people’s humble servants. The supervisors may set out upon a program of economy and efficiency, including, let us say, the standardization of supplies. But the county clerk may not recognize their superior authority, preferring to run his office, to suit his personal convenience; and if the supervisors undertake to check him he may find some way of appealing to the people. The superintendent of the poor, the treasurer and the auditor may likewise go their respective paces in defiance of all superior authority. If in the course of their official routine these officers collect sundry fees, they may account for them or not, as they please, so far as the governing body is concerned. They may be reached by some slow process of litigation, but never in the direct summary way that is employed in private business. It is a fatally ineffectual procedure. And when a dozen or nineteen officers, chosen by popular election, are thrown together, it is clear that every one of them is the legal peer of every other, since everyone acknowledges a common superior. And since the people are a rather too unwieldy body to look after the details of county business, each officer must be a law unto himself. And it is perhaps just as well that none of them has been designated as an official chief, since the _facts_ of organization would refute and nullify any such arrangement. It is as though a board of directors were charged with the control of a private enterprise, but were expressly denied the power to select the manager and heads of departments to whom they might delegate their authority over details. CHAPTER VI A BASE OF POLITICAL SUPPLIES In the course of its democratic adventures the county was incapacitated for standing on its own feet. When every independent elective officer became a law to himself, the county ceased to be a single government. Politically it became then little more than a convenient way of speaking of a group of officers whose field of activity was closely related. In these very close relations lay the material for serious conflicts of interest that brought friction, delays, inaction. County governments could really get nowhere. Their energies were consumed in standing still and keeping alive. Since separate officers of the county had no common superior, the county could not move in any particular direction; no more than an army of self-directing divisions, each with a will of its own.