Papers that go in for public advertising could not in many cases exist without it. Indeed many papers are created for the purpose of absorbing this business. Their circulation is usually limited to a few hundred copies. They cannot afford to criticize the administration in power or to express themselves independently on any public issue. Where there are several such organs in a county (Westchester has about twenty) the newspaper field tends to be closed effectively against the type of legitimate journal which would exercise a wholesome influence on public opinion. Just to what extent and how intensely this stifling influence exists throughout the country is one of the really dark secrets of the county problem. It shows its head in so many widely separated places and there are so many feeble “boiler-plate” weekly papers that carry county advertising, that one is led to suspect that it is a very pervasive factor, especially in rural politics. The importance of county spoils is not merely local. Throughout the northern states, except in New England, the county is undoubtedly the strongest link in the whole nation-wide system of party organization. Party politicians hoot when reformers suggest that local politics has nothing to do with the tariff or the Mexican question. And they are right! Whether properly or improperly, it has _very much_ to do with these questions, or rather with the selection of the men who handle them. The power, for instance, of Tammany Hall in national politics is measured by its power to swing the most populous county in what is usually a pivotal state. Its power in the county is in direct ratio to the number of offices with which it may reward party service. Party organization for a great part of the country has the county committee as its basis. This is especially true of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania where the present organization dates back prior to the Civil War. The state committee is chosen from districts based upon counties and the state machine is an assembling of all the local cogs and wheels. Politicians think and talk in terms of counties in their party councils and in the legislature. State machines are principally an assemblage of county units. In many states legislative representatives are chosen from county districts. Trace the political record of the members of Congress. An astonishing proportion have come up either through county offices or through state legislative positions filled by general county tickets. To that extent the national legislature is the fruit of the county system. And is it not safe to say, with the selection of certain Congressmen in mind, that the stream of national politics is poisoned at the source? It is not strange that machine politicians have come to look upon the county as a source whence blessings flow. The county has both created and sustained them! [3] New Jersey courts have rendered a diametrically opposite opinion. CHAPTER VII URBAN COUNTIES