From coast to coast a deep silence broods over county affairs. Can it be that, while cities have been reveling in franchise scandals and police have been going into partnership with vice interests, while state legislatures have been lightly voting away public money on useless political jobs and extravagant public institutions, the county alone is free from every breath of scandal and is a model of official uprightness? Scores of municipal leagues and city clubs and bureaus of municipal research are delving into city affairs and finding opportunities for betterment at every turn of the hand. But the number of county organizations that are doing critical and constructive work could be numbered on the ten fingers, or less. Many of the colleges offer courses specifically on municipal government, but the “one pervasive unit of local government throughout the United States” is disposed of with a brief mention. No political scientist has ever had the ambition to plow into the soil, so that while there is now available a five-hundred-page bibliography of city government, there has never been written a single volume[1] devoted exclusively to counties. Journalists for the most part have left the subject severely alone. And yet in those few instances where the county has been put under the microscope or has been given more than a passing thought, the reward of the investigators’ labors have always been so certain and rich as to excite wonder as to how much further the shortcomings of the county extend. In Hudson County, N. J., a few years ago, the cost of the court house which had been fixed at nine hundred thousand dollars, threatened to run up to seven million dollars. Impressed by this striking circumstance, a body of citizens formed themselves into a permanent Federation to look deeper and longer into this back alley of their civic life. They found that the court house incident was but the most dramatic of a hundred falls from grace. The Public Efficiency Society of Cook County, Ill., the Westchester County Research Bureau, the Taxpayers’ Association of Suffolk County, the Nassau County Association in New York and the Tax Association of Alameda County in California have all been richly repaid for their investments in county government research. Sporadic cases? Possibly. And then again perhaps there is something basically defective in the system. But is it all a matter of importance?