Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/441

 THE AMERICAN

JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

VOLUME X JANUARY, IQ05 NUMBER 4

PROBLEMS OF MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATION 1

We are accustomed to say that the machinery of government incorporated in the charters of the early American cities, as in the federal and state constitutions, was worked out by men who were strongly under the influence of the historians and doctrinaires of the eighteenth century. The most significant representative of these men is Thomas Jefferson, whose foresight and genius we are here to commemorate, and their most telling phrase is the familiar opening that " all men are created free and equal."

We are only now, however, beginning to suspect that the present admitted failure in municipal administration, the so-called " shame of American cities," may be largely due to the inadequacy of those eighteenth-century ideals, with the breakdown of the machinery which they provided, and further, to the weakness inherent in the historic and doctrinaire method when it attempts to deal with growing and human institutions.

These men were the legitimate successors of the seventeenth- century Puritans in their devotion to pure principle, but they had read poets and philosophers unknown to the Pilgrim fathers, and represented that first type of humanitarian who loves the people without really knowing them, which is by no means an impossible achievement. " The love of those whom a man does not know is quite as elemental a sentiment as the love of those whom a man does know," but with this difference that he expects the people

1 An address delivered at the International Congress of Arts and Science, Department of Politics, September, 1904.

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