The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1900-02-12
IEome Rule i'm Cities.
II II Paper Read Before the Jefferson
Club by Mr. P. ]. Snaey

School union initiated the movement to
secure relief in the provisions of new
charter which should be free from the
hampering and undemocratic restric-
tons of the present one. This brings the
public Of St Paul face to face for the
first effort that is not academic but pure
ly practical to take their place in what
is one of the most remarkable and sig
nllcant movements yet started in this
republic, the return to the people of a
city of the making of their own laws,
through mechanism controlled by them.
after submission to their judgment ex-
pressed By ballot. This throws open to
and forces consideration and discussion,
not SO much of specific charter details
of legislation and administration = they
q come with the submission of the instru-
ment to plebicite, as of concepts of city
government in its relation to the state,
and the effects upon civic character and
through it, upon municipal government.
use the term charter out of defer
ence to the venerableness of the word,
accurate enough when applied to state
acts; or sovereign grants, but a plain
missioner when applied to the municipal
organic law, framed by their fellow cit
liens and accepted by the people of the
city themselves. It is from this point of
view that l purpose discussing the ques-
tons involved
The fact that all forms of government
5 are evolved from and represent racial
characteristics and tendencies invites
brief consideration of those of the domi-
nant races now being welded, under the
influences of institutions freer than any
elsewhere, into a distinct type in our ma
ton and in our city. The dominating
race stocks of, our eitizenry are the Teu-
tonic, the Scandinavian and that con-
glomerate of. both, the English, whose
speech is the common language of all.
But these stocks are all akin in origin,
the north of Europe, and in their chief
characteristics, the differences being
those that came from the isolation that
Tor centuries made nations strangers
where they We're not enemies. Compar-
atlVe philology presents incontestable
evidence of more remote common ORR
gin.
ROMAN CITY GOVERNMENT.
Roman conquest, actual or attempted,
thirteen centuries ago, gives us the first.
historic light upon the peoples sl1rting
the Baltic whose descendants we are, and
we lind there a concept of government
which, excepting the interval in the mid
die ages. when individualism was SUBJ
clesiasticism has been the characteristic
Of the descendants of these Mortimer in
all the lands they have occupied We see
their moots of villages and hundreds and
folk answering to our town, state and
nation; their witenagamote the council
of their wise men; the village moets MAX
Ing laws for village concerns: the
hundreds moot, consisting of village rep
resentatives touching only those affairs
In which villages had common concern,
and the folk moot, taking on the larger
affairs that concerned all the tltbss, caiaf-
ly their wars. Later We find these North
men sweeping down upon, overrunning
and eonquering Southern Europe, with
that inevitable effect of conquest, the alb
sorpticn of botli good and evil from the
conquered! They brought back with them
: their worst loot, the Latin concept of gov
ernment as being conferred in the mon
arch in whom all power was vested, from
whom all rights came as a grant; a con-
cept, however, never fully attained and
frequently strenuously denied. Thus We
ind, the early Saxon kings in England
holding office by election, and the en-
perors of that empire that some. one has
pithify said was neither Roman, nor holy,
nor an empire, We're elected, though not
by their subjects. A very notable excep-
ton, too, is found in the development OF
the cities that formed the famous Han
ow of Nngshfp showed in the arrogation
of governmental powers by the wealthy
merchants and their persistent denial of
a Share in them with the artisan classes.
We find those towns making treaties and
declaring and conducting wars, besides
managing their separate internal affairs
to suit themselves. The germ of individ-
ualism was preserved from destruction by
the eo4Iectivism of absolutism. 1t was
not however, until the sixteenth century
that absolutism met its death blow in the
reformation of Luther, which, while &c
clesiastical in its origin and purpose had
for its vital and vitalizing principle the
right of individual judgment. Since that
date the constant tendency, most rapid
In progress among these Northern peo-
pies, but injecting those in whom individ-
Jalism had been neh-existent or dormant,
mas been the transmutatfon of the power
lodged in the sovereign into rights and
liberties for the mass. More and more
the people have taken over their own
government until in England monarchy,
ncarnate in the third of the Hanoverian
Georges. made its last feeble effort to re-
store monarchism, has faded to the mar
est shadow in Queen Victoria, reincar-
mated, however, with limitations, in re-
sponsible ministry, and parliament
whose powers, again within broad con-
stitutionaI limits, is as autccratic as were
Stuarts or Plantagenets
ENGLISH INDIA.
The history of the English people, con-
glGmerate as they We're and are of all
these races of Northern Europe gives to
its students little of value if he get from
1t but the story of contending kings and
barons or of the different houses that
won and held and abused power, and
fails to see. running through it ALL the
struggle of the individual for greater
rights and liberties, wrestling power from
the throne and transmitting it into free
dom for himself. In fact all modern his
tory among civilized peoples is but the
story of this struggle. But even to this
day the idea that a municipality as such
Is an Individual, with its own character
Istics, entitled to as much freedom Of
action as are it's citizens, with proper
functions in the exercise of which it
should be as much left to its own judg
nent as the citizen is in his, bound only
so to use its rights and powers as not
tn conflict with the rights of others, this
concept has not yet obtained footing and
the parliament retains the ancient doc
trine that municipal rights, powers and
privileges are the gift of the sovereign,
and. like all gifts, to be construed by
fine courts strongly against the donee and
In favor of the donor This is all the
more singular that, on the continent,
where monarchism retains more of its
old sbsolutism, municipalities are held to
rave inherent rights and powers in the
management Of their purely local affairs
we see in Germany the idea
of local self rule that distin-
;bod their ancestors centuries