State and municipal political forms are being constantly changed, and they are being changed because they have been so extremely unsatisfactory in their actual operation.

The local political machinery becomes, consequently, the natural and useful subject of reconstructive experiments.

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.