The coroner, too, sadly missed the mark in numerous cases. In the new industrial order in the cities, not only was criminal violence multiplied but industrial fatalities added heavily to the terrors of city life for the working class. The civil liabilities which were imposed upon employers and upon insurance companies made it more than ever important that every sudden or suspicious death be investigated with the utmost scientific thoroughness. Such service it was of course impossible for the untrained elective political coroner to render, and the world will never know the costly mistakes that are chargeable to his inexpertness. In the fullness of time court organization also revealed the necessity for differentiation between various classes of cases which were presented for settlement. Again, the protection of life against communicable diseases and of property against fire were two functions that the rural local government had completely overlooked or neglected, and when urban conditions arose in the midst of the county there was nothing in the original local government machinery that could be made to respond to these needs. The county was apparently stereotyped to minister to local conditions as they were conceived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its organization was merely adapted to perform the simple cut-and-dried services that had been laid down for it in centuries gone by. Its expansion into new and bigger fields of service seems never to have been seriously considered. But the pungent fact is that counties, when they have ceased to serve the needs of urban life, have been so slow to retire from the field. What state has stripped the sheriff of his power to interfere in a riot or a strike to the infinite annoyance of the thousand per cent. more competent police force of the city? How very few states have shown the coroner the door and replaced him with a scientifically trained medical examiner! Not less ridiculous the board of county supervisors in great cities like Chicago, Cleveland and Milwaukee, solemnly ruling over a territory almost identical in its extent with the bailiwick of the city authorities. Why should not a single body do all the local regulating? And so, the urban county problem is first of all a question of ill-adapted instruments of government perpetuated long past their period of utility.