terms, were as follows: controller, auditor, treasurer, register, collector, recorder of deeds, inspector of weights and measures, sheriff, coroner, president of Board of Assessors, and president of the Board of Public Improvements.

ASSESSMENT AND PUBLIC WORKS.

THE assessment of property for purposes of taxation is deemed in every American city one of the municipal functions most vitally affecting the municipal corporation on the one hand and the individual citizen on the other. The St. Louis plan provides for the election by all the voters, for each quadrennial period, of the president of the Board of Assessors. The Municipal Assembly lays out the town into a number of assessment districts, and for each district an assessor is appointed by the mayor, and confirmed by the Council. At present the number of districts is nine. The assessors do their work under the absolute direction of the president of the Board of Assessors, who maintains a large office, with numerous deputies, draftsmen, and clerks, all of whom he is authorized to appoint, subject only to the approval of the mayor. Having directed the whole work of annual reassessment of property, and obtained results as uniform as possible, the president of the board acts as president of the Board of Equalization, his fellow-members of that board being four real-estate owners of the city, who must have lived in St. Louis at least ten years, and who derive their appointments from the concurrent action of the judges of the Circuit Court. Thus the delicate business of finding the yearly tax-basis is satisfactorily safeguarded, and it is sufficient to say that the collection, care, and disbursement of the public revenue is also managed upon an orderly and well-devised system.

The Board of Public Improvements is a body of very exceptional importance, and one which, in the St. Louis plan of municipal administration, holds an altogether peculiar place. The president of this board, like that of the Board of Assessors, is popularly elected. He has general executive oversight of public buildings, street improvements, and public works of all kinds. His associates in the Board of Public Improvements are five officials, known as the Street Commissioner, the Sewer Commissioner, the Water Commissioner, the Harbor and Wharf Commissioner, and the Park Commissioner. These five are appointed for four-year terms by the mayor, subject to the confirmation of the Council. Each com

missioner is at the head of the working department indicated by his title, and each one appoints the entire body of subordinate officials employed in his department, subject only to the approbation of the mayor.

This Board of Public Improvements, acting through its president, lets all contracts for public work, subject to the final approval of the mayor and the Council, and takes full charge of street openings, the extension of paving, sewerage, or water-supply, and all kindred matters. The existing membership is of high character and ability, and the general reputation of the board for the twenty years of the working of the present charter seems to have been high. Thus the Municipal Assembly is ready to leave matters of detail very largely to the judgment of this expert board.

THE MUNICIPAL CIVIL SERVICE.

AMONG other appointive officers, in addition to the five department heads and the district assessors already specified, are the city counselor, the superintendents of the work house, the house of refuge, and the fire and police telegraph system, two police justices, a board of charity commissioners, a public library board, a commissioner of supplies, and an assessor of water-rates. These are all named directly by the mayor, and all of them are subject to confirmation by the Council; that is to say, the upper branch of the Municipal Assembly. The host of minor office-holders are, under the charter, subject to appointment and removal by the heads of their respective departments, the mayor alone having power to interpose an objection.

As to the question of civil-service reform, no merit system has yet been adopted either by the State of Missouri or by the city of St. Louis. A change of administration always means, ultimately, a very large change in the body of office-holders. The present administration of St. Louis is strongly Republican. Every one of the thirteen members of the Council is a Republican, and twenty-four of the twenty-eight members of the House of Delegates belong to that party. The mayor is one of the leading members of his party in the State. Mayor C. P. Walbridge, who came to St. Louis perhaps twenty years ago fresh from the law school at Ann Arbor, entered upon his public career through a term or two in the House of Delegates. Subsequently he was elected president of the Council, serving four years in that capacity. In the spring of 1893 he was elected mayor, and his term will expire next year.

An interesting feature of the St. Louis charter is its requirement that the mayor shall not make appointments (except to fill vacancies) until the beginning of his third year. Thus, under Mayor Walbridge's administration, the Democratic heads of departments held over until the spring of 1895, when a sweeping change was made, and Republicans were installed in most of the desirable places. Mr. Walbridge's appointments in general, so far as I have been able to judge, will bear close inspection. Mr. Holman, the water commissioner, was very properly reappointed. Mr. Stone, the new harbor and wharf commissioner, had been engaged in educational work for many years, had served in the House of Delegates, and confers honor upon the municipal administration of St. Louis. Mr. Saunders, the mayor's representative on the Board of Election and Registration Commissioners, is a journalist of high character and qualifications. The health commissioner in turn enjoys a high reputation. The Library Board is admirably constituted, and others of Mr. Walbridge's appointees merit similar indorsement.

THE MUNICIPAL PARLIAMENT.

It is highly instructive to note the great difference in the personnel of the House of Delegates, elected on the ward system, and of the Council, composed of men elected at large. The present Council has for its president Mr. Charles Nagel, a lawyer, a man of education and culture, and a citizen of high standing, who enjoys the confidence of the community. One of the members of the Council is Mr. Halsey S. Ives, who is known throughout the country for his services as the efficient director of the Fine Arts Department of the Columbian Exposition; and he is at once the head of art education in St. Louis, and a citizen well versed in public affairs. Other members of the Council are gentlemen of repute and character. The integrity and general intelligence of the Council are not often very seriously questioned. There have been times, under the present charter, when the group of men in the upper branch of the Municipal Assembly would have done credit to any legislative body in the land.

While pleasant things may be said touching the capacity and character of some individual members of the House of Delegates, the impression that the body, as a whole, makes upon the visitor is that of a very ordinary, in fact, a very unprepossessing group.

Both the House of Delegates and the Council meet regularly two evenings every week.

The members also have a large amount of committee work to do, and thus the city affairs absorb a great deal of their time and attention. Their compensation is only three hundred dollars a year. I have the impression that it would be better if the compensation were either made much larger or else abolished altogether. If considerably larger it might stimulate a better class of men to seek election to the House of Delegates, while if abolished it might keep some undesirable candidates out of the field.

Except as a training-school for young politicians, I do not think the House of Delegates serves any useful purpose. If it were abolished altogether, and if the Council were then considerably enlarged, members of the Council serving for six years instead of four, and one third of the body retiring every two years, all members as at present being elected at large, St. Louis would, in my opinion, have not only a simpler, but also a much better plan of municipal government.

When the worst has been said about the Municipal Assembly of St. Louis, it remains true that it is a body of altogether as high character and ability as the legislature of the State of Missouri. The great boon which the charter confers lies in the fact that so far as city affairs are concerned the Assembly is a fully empowered deliberative body. Many hundreds of bills affecting the city of New York are introduced into the legislature at Albany at every annual session. The very matters dealt with in these bills are, for the most part, the kind of matters that in St. Louis are under constant discussion in the Municipal Assembly, which has full authority to deal with them. Such discussion is with open doors, and the daily papers are always represented by their regular reporters. Inasmuch as there is no dispensing with the deliberative function in the conduct of the Municipal affairs of a great city, it is always an advantage to have that function exercised (1) by men expressly selected for that purpose, and (2) under the immediate observation of the people concerned.

HOW ST. LOUIS ACQUIRED GOOD STREETS.

THROUGH most of its history St. Louis had been unpleasantly but distinctly famous for its mud. For the better part of a century, visitors whose published notes of travel included some account of St. Louis had not failed to dwell upon the frightful condition of the streets in wet weather. The original mud was clayey, clinging, and bottomless.

There came a period of macadamized roads made from the broken limestone of the region. This limestone is very soft, and on streets where traffic is heavy it is quickly ground into a white dust, which no amount of sprinkling can keep wholly down in summer, and which in winter and the rainy period forms a deep, splashy mud. In the earlier days of the Nicholson pavement experiments St. Louis tried, to a limited extent, the substitution of that style of wooden-block roadway for the limestone macadam. But the wooden blocks were laid upon temporary and improper foundations, and soon became worse than the streets they had replaced. Thus St. Louis could not claim a single well-paved street.

It was characteristic of this solid, conservative town, with its mercantile motives, that its business men finally awoke to a realizing sense of the fact that well-paved streets are a sound investment, and that conversely there comes a time in the business growth of a large town when bad streets are too positively detrimental to be longer tolerated. Their point of view was that of the property owner. They determined that the heavy expense of reconstruction must be borne by the owners of abutting property. They came to the conclusion that, for down-town business streets, there was only one kind of pavement which the experience of the world had found to be virtually indestructible under all climatic conditions. This was a pavement of granite blocks, placed upon a solid concrete foundation. The sentiment of the responsible business community in favor of the reconstruction of St. Louis streets on this plan was recognized by the city government, and the new policy was entered upon in the year 1882.

Reports of the Public Works Department show that there are now nearly fifty miles of streets paved with granite block. Quite recently the policy has been adopted of paving the down-town alleys with vitrified brick. In some of the best residence neighborhoods well-laid asphalt streets are found, and it is probable that the use of asphalt will increase rapidly. The success of vitrified brick leads to the opinion that it may become largely used for roadways in residence districts in the early future. Outside the central districts macadam roads still prevail. Sidewalks, curbstones, and gutters in St. Louis are now very generally made of artificial stone, locally known as granitoid.

The definite policy as regards the finances of street-paving continues to be the assessment of the cost against the owners of adjacent property. Where there are street-car

lines the cost to property-owners is reduced, by virtue of provisions in the municipal charter and city ordinances, which require the street-car company to pave and maintain the roadway between rails, between the lines of trackage, and for a foot beyond the outside rails. Adjacent property is assessed according to linear frontage, no account being made of buildings and improvements. It is provided, however, that the cost of paving must not exceed twenty-five per cent. of the assessed value of the parcels of ground against which the charge is made. Evidently this provision delays the paving of streets in parts of the town where property has a comparatively low valuation.

THE MAZE OF OVERHEAD WIRES.

UNTIL a very recent period a stranger in the St. Louis thoroughfares was annoyed by the absence of street names on the corners. A few scarcely legible, much battered tin signs were found at rare intervals nailed to telegraph poles, but otherwise the stranger was without guidance. One of the incidental benefits accruing to St. Louis from the selection of that city for the Republican Presidential Convention took form in an ordinance -pushed through the Municipal Assembly in February-authorizing the Board of Public Improvements to select a satisfactory style of street signs, and appropriating money for their erection, at the earliest possible date. The visitors at the convention, therefore, will have no occasion to criticize the lack of street signs; but they will, therefore, be the more at liberty to observe and criticize the one remaining disgrace of the streets of St. Louis. No other great city in the whole world now permits electric wires to be strung overhead in the central business streets.

This abuse has reached almost intolerable dimensions in St. Louis. I have myself counted, at various street intersections in the heart of the best business districts of St. Louis, as many as fourteen poles grouped within a few feet of the four corners. And this does not include lamp-posts or the standards supporting the new street signs. An elevated railway could scarcely fill up or overshadow a street more entirely than do the poles and wires of the electric companies on a great thoroughfare like Pine street, for example. These poles range in size from the iron ones that support the trolley-wires of the electric street-railway system to the huge masts that carry the telephone and telegraph wires.

Every one acknowledges that these poles should be abolished, and that the wires should

be placed under the sidewalks or roadways; the subject is under perennial debate in the Municipal Assembly. But the public authority seems to lack the stern resolution necessary to force so many conflicting corporations into agreement upon one harmonious plan. Every company naturally desires an independent right to tear up street-paving or sidewalks, and to bury its own wires at its own time and in its own way. Each one insists upon quoting the privileges it has succeeded in obtaining in some other city, and demands that St. Louis be not one whit less indulgent.

of St. Louis inside of the municipal limits now traverses about two hundred and fifty miles of streets, and has a trackage (double track being reduced to terms of single track) of three hundred and fifty or perhaps four hundred miles. This is regarded in St. Louis, and I believe justly, as a more complete and extensive electric-transit system than any other large city possesses. The municipal charter provides that no one line may have exclusive use of trackage on a central thoroughfare, but that, under reasonable terms and regulations, other lines must be permitted to pass their cars over the same tracks. A considerable number of street-railway companies in

FORMED THE CITY.

FOR the present, and perhaps for many years to come, the overhead trolley-wire is expected to remain as it is. If the trolley has some objections, it stands, nevertheless, for an agency which is transforming St. Louis in a manner that causes conservative old residents to rub their eyes in bewildered surprise. The schemes of separation which made St. Louis a free city entirely independent of St. Louis County in the year 1876 very greatly increased the municipal boundaries. The county generously conceded land enough. for the future growth of a great city. The new limits included an area somewhat exceeding sixty square miles. The actual town-as closely built and occupied by at least ninety per cent. of the population-was in those days well within an area of twelve or fifteen square miles. In the succeeding decade and a half the street system was gradually extending, and the penumbral fringes were duly widening, while the mule-car lines penetrated a little farther northward, westward, and southwestward. Some great park spaces had been reserved outside the old city limits before the act of divorce between city and county, and these spaces were included within the new city limits. The population was slowly creeping out toward these desirable pleasuregrounds, but the rapid development of the outer zone of the municipal area was awaiting the advent of a system of improved transit.

The electric trolley was found to be the system best adapted to the situation. Two or three comparatively short cable-lines had been constructed, but otherwise the leisurely mule-car was in universal vogue. The last mule disappeared in the early days of the present year (1896) from the solitary line which had continued to use animal power. With its substantial beginnings going back scarcely further than 1890, the trolley system

VOL. LII.-33.

and separate franchises, and in the heart of the town the cars of several different companies will be found on the same streets.

In their dealings with the city government the street-railway companies have come off very easy victors. The old mule-lines were readily invested with the new and very valuable trolley privileges, and in most cases they were given twenty-five-year franchise extensions, upon terms which allow the city treasury a frivolously small compensation for privileges possessing an enormous cash value.

PLAN OF THE TOWN-HOUSING OF

THE PEOPLE.

THE original town of St. Louis was founded within an outward bend of the Mississippi River, and of course lay close upon the bank. The river's great curve, which gives the city a crescent front, extends a number of miles northward and southward from the spot originally chosen as the site of the town. Taking an area about two miles square as constituting the old town, -that is to say, taking two miles of central river-front with the district extending two miles westward,—one will find the new Union Station at the precise center of this area. The great steel bridge spans the river at the central point, and a railroad tunnel extends from the end of the bridge to the colossal station a mile westward. Now, if a curve be drawn with a radius of five miles from the Union Station, the resulting line will very nearly coincide with the limits of the municipal area. The city, however, owns another strip of land on the river-front to the northward, and a corresponding strip at the extreme southern limit, which give a total river-frontage of eighteen miles. Although a good many corners have to be turned, the trolley system manages to radiate from the central district to the outlying parts, some

what as the principal veins of a big leaf distribute themselves. In fact, the physical structure of St. Louis strikingly resembles the configuration of certain broad, fan-shaped leaves, the great steel bridge serving for the

stem.

As the city spreads outward at the circumference, it extends skyward at the center. In no other city of the world, New York and Chicago alone excepted, has the construction of great iron-framed commercial edifices since 1890 been so extensive, or wrought so much of change, as in St. Louis. It seems likely that the city not many years hence will be face to face with the new problem-how to accommodate the street traffic pouring into the small district of sky-scrapers from the great outlying districts of well-scattered cottages and villas. Such are the transformations that the trolley is working in St. Louis. It is producing like effects in many another town, but perhaps no other great city so well serves to illustrate the entire process.

The most important public buildings in St. Louis are the Post-office, the Court-house, the High School, the new City Hall, the Exposition Building, and the Union Railway Station. Not one of them is so situated as to have its architectural qualities enhanced by a spacious approach. If they could have been made to front upon open squares, or, with other public buildings, such as museums, theaters, and hotels, could have been grouped about one or more central spaces, the effect would have been much improved, while a more distinct articulation would thus have been given to the whole city.

In the acquisition of great terminal freight-yards, the railway companies have displaced much of the old house property in the narrow, close-built streets lying near the river, both northward and southward from the central bridge. This fact is a fortunate one; for the districts appropriated by the railways had contained much of the most decayed and unwholesome tenement-house property in St. Louis. Thus the operations of the railway companies near the river-concurring with the new expansion of the suburbs made possible by the development of transit lineshave assisted in the outward movement of the population.

The development of St. Louis as a manufacturing city has been swift and prosperous. Great factories lie, for the most part, southward from the business center, although many of them have also spread northward. Various industries, moreover, remain within the confines of the district which is chiefly given

over to office-buildings, financial institutions, wholesale houses, and large retail establishments. Formerly the factories lay, for the most part, outside the area principally occupied by the homes of working-people. The recent tendency has been to build workingmen's homes outside the circle of the factories. The building and loan associations, of which there are a great number in St. Louis, seem to have played an important part in the new housing movement, while the real-estate companies, with the facilities which they have offered for the purchase of small houses on the instalment plan, have also, doubtless, made it possible for thousands of mechanics and employed men of small incomes to own their own homes.

To the visitor wholly unfamiliar with St. Louis, or acquainted with it only as it was ten years ago, nothing appears more striking than the array of fine homes in the great central-western district, and in the newer districts in the vicinity of the large parks. The typical home of the well-to-do St. Louis family of to-day is a large, square brick mansion standing detached in a small but attractive environment of yard room. There is much variety in architectural details, and great magnificence in many of the newest houses. The prevailing material for large houses as well as for small is a bright and cheerful red brick; but yellow or cream-colored brick has become popular of late, and many beautiful houses in the western suburbs have been built with that material. Frame-houses in St. Louis are comparatively rare. Particularly characteristic of these newer parts of the city are the many so-called "places.>> These consist, usually, of one short private street with an ornamental entrance at each end, lined with a double row of attractive mansions, harmonious in general style and symmetrically arranged, with carefully kept lawns, without fences, and with considerable attention to parkway and landscape details.

PUBLIC LIGHTING AND THE SMOKE NUISANCE. THE pleasures of life in St. Louis would be much enhanced if the smoke nuisance could be totally abated. Soft coal is the fuel of the place, and it is mined in exhaustless quantities only a few miles away on the Illinois. side of the river. It is said that no city of equal size has so cheap and abundant a coalsupply at so short a distance from its gates.

It has been suggested by Mr. N. O. Nelson that instead of transporting the coal from the mines, there should be erected in immediate