Just as private initiative is trying not to be swallowed up by the community, so the community is trying to save itself from the state. So far as the village, town, or county is concerned, nobody denies that state experts could afford a better public service than the inexperienced local boards, and, nevertheless, it is felt that every place knows best after all just what is adapted to its own needs. The closest adaptation to local desires, as, say, in questions of public schools and roads, has been always a fundamental American principle. This principle started originally from the peculiar conditions which existed in the several colonies and from the needs of the pioneers; but it has led to such a steady progress in the country’s development that no American would care to give it up, even if here and there certain advantages could be had by introducing greater uniformities. There is a still more urgent motive; it is only this opportunity of regulating the affairs of the small district which gives to every community, even every neighbourhood, the necessary schooling for the public duties of the American citizen. If he is deprived of the right to take care of his own district, that spirit of self-determination and independence cannot develop, on which the success of the American experiment in democracy entirely depends. Political pedagogy requires that the state shall respect the individuality of the small community so far as this is in any way possible.
The relation between the city and the state is somewhat different; no one would ask the parliamentarians of the state legislature to hold off in order that the population of the large city may have the opportunity to keep their political interests alive and to preserve their spirit of self-determination. This spirit is at home in the streets of the great city; it is not only wide-awake there, but it is clamorous and almost too urgent. When, now, the municipalities in their struggle against the dictation of the state, meet with the sympathies of intelligent people, this is owing to the simple fact that the city, in which all cultured interests are gathered generally, has in all matters a higher point of view than the representatives of the entire state, in which the more primitive rural population predominates. When, for instance, the provincial members which the State of New York has elected meet in Albany, and with their rural majority make regulations for governing the three million citizens of New York City, regulations which are perhaps paternally well meant, but which sometimes show a petty distrust and disapproval of that great and wicked place, the result is often grotesque. The state laws, however, favour this sort of dictation.