Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/458

 442 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

from premature labor ; or among the adults, whose vital force is exhausted, long before the allotted span of life. We distrust the instinct to shelter and care for them, although it is as old and as much at the foundation of human progress as is individual ini- tiative itself.

The traditional government of East London expresses its activity in keeping the streets clean, and the district lighted and policed. It is only during the last quarter of the century that the London County Council has erected decent houses, public baths, and many other devices for the purer social life of the people; while American cities have gone no farther, although they pre- sumably started at workingmen's representation a hundred years ago, so completely were the founders misled by the name of gov- ernment, and the temptation to substitute the form of political democracy for real self-government dealing with advancing social ideals. Even now London has twenty-eight borough coun- cils in addition to the London County Council itself, and fifteen hundred direct representatives of the people, as over against seventy in Chicago, with a population one-half as large. Paris has twenty mayors with corresponding machinery for local gov- ernment, as over against New York's concentration in one huge city hall, too often corrupt.

In Germany, as the municipal and social-economic exhibits of this exposition so magnificently show, the government has come to concern itself with the primitive essential needs of its working- people. In their behalf the government has forced industry, in the person of the large manufacturers, to make an alliance with it, and they are taxed for accident insurance of workingmen, for old- age pensions, and for sick benefits; indeed, a project is being formed in which they shall bear the large share of insurance against nonemployment, when it has been made clear that non- employment is the result of financial crisis brought about through the maladministration of finance. And yet industry in Germany has flourished, and this control on behalf of the normal working- man, as he faces life in the pursuit of his daily vocation, has apparently not checked its systematic growth nor limited its place in the world's market.