The county has been put to its severest test in modern urban communities. In the latter part of the eighteenth century began the away-from-the-farm movement. The discovery of steam power and its application to every department of industry began to draw men, women and children from their homes to earn a livelihood in the new industrial order. It became necessary for them to congregate in factories; they could no longer spread themselves out over the countryside. Out of the factory system came the city, came hundreds of cities along the coasts and rivers and even on the open prairies. New methods of transportation accelerated the process. The movement has never stopped; not even yet, when more than a third of the country’s inhabitants are living in cities of twenty-five thousand inhabitants and more. Out of the growth of cities came congestion of population; out of congestion, problems of very existence without number. The colonial heritage of local government was wholly unadapted to any such emergency. In simple pioneer communities it was easy to provide government that met the unexacting standards of the times. Efficient government was not a live issue. Government, good or bad, was little needed and there was little of it. And if that little was ill-conceived, what matter? But the time came when local government began to feel the strain of new responsibilities. Cities failed miserably--“conspicuously.” Counties failed even more miserably but without observation. It was not so much that local government was called upon to perform more services, but that it was to adapt itself to new conditions of service, to execute old forms of service in a more intensive fashion. For instance, in a general way, the state had charged the county with the protection of life. Under rural conditions the obligation seems to have been performed tolerably well, because violations of the law are rarer where population is thin. A sheriff, with the help of a few constables and the power to summon citizens to his aid in times of special emergency, was all the police that was needed in most communities. With the growth of the city the police problem was intensified even out of proportion to the numbers of the people. Keeping the peace came to mean no longer the mere matter of quelling disturbances. The city with its teeming population not only bred violence and disorder, but it afforded opportunities for immunity through concealment. A new police problem quite foreign to the capacities of the ancient office of sheriff grew up. The city had to meet the professional, scientific criminal with specialized instrumentalities and organization. Crowds on the congested city streets had to be taken care of and numerous other incidentals of the congested city had to be foreseen. The city likewise developed an entirely new problem of public charity, which quite outgrew the capacities of that amateur sociologist, the county poormaster.