Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/313

Rh and manufactures, without their aggregations of capital, their business systems and institutions, and their fostering care of art, science, and literature, it would seem impossible that there could be any civilization or progress.

These great municipalities are the exponents of the national advancement in material wealth, in commercial importance and influence, and in all forms of intellectual and moral culture. In times past they have been the agencies through which civil and intellectual freedom have been conserved, even if they may not be credited with having been the nursery in which liberty was cradled. They constitute the medium through which we must study many of the most important and interesting phases of history, and are the sources of all the greatest enterprises of the world.

So thoroughly do cities become representative of national life and characteristics, that it is frequently said that London is England, Rome is Italy, and Paris is France. In a less comprehensive but nevertheless very important sense it might properly be said that New York represents America, Boston stands for New England, and Chicago for the great West. A thorough acquaintance with either of these great cities is equivalent to knowing well the people by whom they are surrounded.

Notwithstanding their important relation to all that is significant or influential in national life and history, it is nevertheless true that there has never been developed anything, which even by courtesy, could be called a science of municipal government. Indeed, it is only within these latest years that the fact that there could be such a science has even been suggested. But the pressure has been constantly growing more and more imperious. Monstrosities which are the legitimate fruit of the hap-hazard system, or rather lack of system, which characterizes the government of many cities, evils of administration and burdens of taxation that had become almost unendurable; the astounding frauds which have been brought to light within the last few years in New York and Philadelphia, and the usurpation of power by demagogues through the aid of the most degraded elements of society, have at last forced an inquiry as to what form of municipal government will most efficiently correct present abuses and reduce to the minimum the opportunities for harm to the body politic.

Men begin to ask whether the municipal authority may not be so organized and administered that it shall promote and protect the interests of both the corporation and the individual; whether the evils to which I have alluded, and others equally apparent and subversive of the ends of good government, are inherent in our municipal system or only incident thereto. And some effort has been made to ascertain the principles which underlie a legitimate municipal authority and the most efficient means of making the application of those principles practical.