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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GOVERNMENT BY COMMISSION Some Observations Regarding the Indiana Utility Commission Act. Stuart Mackibbin. The last General Assembly of Indiana, in the due course of its session, comprising less than sixty working days, enacted 363 statutes, including joint resolutions, comprising 967 pages of the statute book, and it is a legislative, if not a legal fiction, that all and every part of this was done with due care and deliberation. One of these acts, the same .being Chapter 76, known as the Public Utility Act, or rather certain phases of it, will occupy our attention for a brief period. This act is a step in some direction; whether forward, or backward, or sideways, the future alone can tell, although many of the present day are very sure and certain that the act is certainly a long step toward the realization of what is known as government by commission. New York state in the past, from time to time has made many attempts to govern municipalities?especially in their private concerns?by legislative action, to give the government of its municipal corporations, or parts thereof, to the control of commissions selected other than by the people of the municipality. It is an historical fact, whatever the plea or excuse may have been in the state of New York for removing the government or a part of the government of municipal corporations from the inhabitants thereof, whatever pleas and arguments there may have been of local corruption and incompetency, that the real, the ultimate purpose, in the case of one municipality at least?when we consider that the city of New York was ruled by one party, or rather by a faction of one party, and the Legislature controlled by another, was, with apologies to Aesop, in many instances to afford room for a new, if not a hungrier, swa...