But almost everywhere, at some point short of full county annihilation, the pressure of the city stopped. Perhaps it was the politicians who intervened, to save “the boys” at the court house; or perhaps it was the feeling that seems to have settled down upon our political thinking, that counties, like death and taxes, have to be. Within very recent years, bold spirits in some of the metropolitan centers have begun to feel that the county, in their particular communities, was a public nuisance and have been “going” for it. Thus the New York _Times_, when the New York Constitutional Convention was in session in 1915, delivered not a few strokes for a proposition to abolish existing boundaries of the sixty-one counties and substitute therefor eight administrative districts. Cleveland, Ohio, reformers would like to have that city divorce itself from the rural part of Cuyahoga County. In Rochester, a recent survey has suggested a similar course with reference to Monroe County. Studies have also been made recently (1916) by the City Club of Milwaukee. A member of the city commission in Jersey City has recently caused to be passed in the legislature a bill providing for a vote on consolidation of municipalities in Hudson County on a sort of borough plan. In Cincinnati the question of consolidation of the city with Hamilton County was recently opened, apparently for the first time, in newspaper discussions. In the 1916 New York legislature there was under discussion a bill extending control of the board of estimate and apportionment in New York City over the employees of the five counties within the city. This was in line with a recent report by the chamberlain and the commissioner of accounts of New York City submitted to the Constitutional Convention, which pointed out the advantages of the abolition of counties in New York City and the transfer of their functions to the control of the city authorities. St. Louis City actually accomplished the fact in 1876 when it separated from St. Louis County. Baltimore and a number of Virginia cities have long been separated (for historical rather than reformatory reasons, however,) from the surrounding rural or suburban territory. In practice, the process of relocation of county boundary lines is very much like the reversing of a long series of court decisions. Local tradition and the gradual crystallizing of the interests of local politicians militate powerfully to maintain the _status quo_. And, yet, for all that, the shifting of boundary lines must inevitably come, if local governments are to meet their obligations. Just where and by what criteria the new lines are to be laid is no easy question to decide; our metropolitan centers are of such various origins and in such differing degrees of development. The committee on City-County Consolidation of the National Municipal League in a preliminary report rendered in 1916 seeks to classify the urban communities in this fashion: