The city too has proven itself an altogether unfavorable environment for clean, active county citizenship. A thousand and one preoccupations and distractions in the city have strongly tended to drive the populace to forget that it even lives in a county. The county does little for the city dweller. It does not keep his house from burning or his pockets from being picked. It does not build the streets on which he travels nor perform any humane services which could stir his admiration. The sheriff is no neighbor of his nor does he hear of that officer from one year’s end to another, unless it be his rare fortune to be a party to some legal action. The newspapers, to be sure, are apt to give a great deal of space to criminal trials and feature the activities of the district attorney. But even that is apt to be directed more to metropolitan sensationalism than to helpful citizenship. The greater the power entrusted to the municipalities within the county, the more interesting things it is given to do, in just that measure does the county itself suffer from inattention on the part of the citizens, till the extreme is reached in a condition described in a report on Cook County by Prof. F. D. Bramhall of the University of Chicago: “The city corporate stands in the mind of most men for their local government; it has its picturesque history, its visible physical embodiments, its corporate personality, its stimulus to the pride of its people and its claim upon their loyalty. The county can make no such appeal, and it is a political fact to be reckoned with that however you may urge that the county is an essential part of city government, that the city electorate is almost equivalent to the county electorate, and should assert an equal proprietorship, it is almost impossible to overcome the obsession that the county is an alien thing. There is no more serious consequence of the parceling out of our local governmental powers and the shattering of responsibility for our municipal housekeeping than just this forfeiture of the sense of identification with government and the force of local patriotism which should be a tremendous asset for American political government.” Without a doubt, the urban, and particularly the metropolitan county, is the county at its worst. CHAPTER VIII COUNTY GOVERNMENTS AT WORK “Granted the truth of all you say; that every county officer stands on his independent pedestal of authority, that the county is a headless institution where responsibility is scattered in a thousand different directions; that urban counties are the weakest brothers in the political family--granted all that, but what of it?” So cogitates the “average American”--or so it would seem. If he reads his county paper consistently he has been held in his seat over and over again by the hackneyed lines of Pope: “For forms of government let fools contest; What e’er is best administered is best.”