Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/181

 cities, like Glasgow, for instance, whose municipal democracy is so far ahead of ours, or in the German cities where municipal administration is veritably a science. But in Steffens's case a lack of knowledge was in itself a qualification, since he had eyes, like the old sailor, and, like Joseph Conrad, the power to tell what he saw. That is, Steffens had vision, imagination, and if the history of the city in America is ever written he will fill a large place on its page.

I marvel when I reflect that he could see so clearly what most had not even the sensitiveness to feel. He went at his task quite in the scientific spirit, isolating first that elementary germ or microbe, the partizan , the man who always voted the straight ticket in municipal elections, the most virulent organism that ever infested the body politic and as unconscious of its toxic power as the bacillus of yellow fever. Then he discovered the foul culture this organism blindly breeds—the political machine, with its boss. But he went on and his quest led him to the public service corporation, the street railway company, the gas company, the electricity company, and then his trail led him out into the state, and he produced a series of studies of politics in the American cities which has never been equaled, and so had a noble and splendid part in the great awakening of our time.

As long as his writings exposed only the low and the vulgar politicians, ward heelers and bosses, and the like, he was quite popular; I believe he was even asked to deliver addresses before clubs of the dilettante, and even in churches, for the righteous were