By far the most important branch of general administration with which county officers serve is the judiciary. Counties, except in a few states, are the units for selection of judges having original jurisdiction in both civil and criminal cases which involve moderate amounts of money and less than the most serious offenses. With the county court also is generally associated probate jurisdiction, which is exercised in some of the eastern states by a special officer known as the surrogate, who may be a judge as in New York, or a purely ministerial officer, as in New Jersey. Legally the judiciary is more nearly a part of a state system than any other branch of the county organization. The decisions of the judges are of course subject to appeal to a higher state court--that is an important form of control. Sometimes, as in California, a part of the salary of the county judge is paid from state funds. Probably too the greater popular respect that hedges about the bench is sufficient to set it apart from much of the sinister influence that often affects the other officers of the county. Nevertheless, the county court in common with other divisions of the judiciary, is subject to a wide variety of disintegrating forces. It has a variegated allegiance: to the people (in most of the states) for its original selection, to the county governing body for many incidental items of financial support, and to higher judicial authority for confirmation or revision of its decisions. It does not control its executive agents, such as the sheriff and the county clerk, who are usually independent elective officers. The readjustment of this situation can hardly be effected satisfactorily apart from a complete reorganization of the state’s judicial system. This will undoubtedly involve, among other things, a much more complete central control on the part of a state chief justice and a judicial council. The courts must be organized with a keener appreciation that a judge in rendering just and learned decisions is a part of a business machine--he is waiting on customers; that there is no sound reason why the judicial department should defy the principle of responsibility any more than a department which serves the public in another way. In the general overhauling of the systems, perhaps the elective county judge will disappear. But liberty, for all that, will not vanish from the earth. States as diverse in their location and composition as New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey and South Carolina never drifted quite completely into the habit of “electing everybody,” and they are good states. The Federal judiciary, too, is appointive, and it is not more culpable, by standards of either the progressiveness or of administrative efficiency, than most of the state courts.