A policy of institutional reform
must prove its value and gain its experience chiefly in this field; and
in formulating such a policy reformers will be placing their hands upon
the most palpable and best-recognized weakness in the American political
system.
A popular but ill-founded American political illusion concerns the
success of their state governments. Americans tend to believe that these
governments have on the whole served them well, whereas in truth they
have on the whole been ill served by their machinery of local
administration and government. The failure has not, perhaps, been as
egregious or as scandalous as has been that of their municipal
institutions; but it has been sufficiently serious to provoke continual
but abortive attempts to improve them; and it has had so many dangerous
consequences that the cause and cure of their inefficiency constitute
one of the most fundamental of American political problems. The
consequences of the failure have been mitigated because the weakness of
the state governments has been partly concealed and redeemed by the
comparative strength and efficiency of the central government.
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