Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/69

Rh familiar and have been so frequently exploited as to obviate the necessity of repetition. The papers are and have been full of Metropolitan Boston, Greater New York, Greater Chicago, Greater Jersey City, Greater Newark—Philadelphia has been Greater Philadelphia since 1854, when the Consolidation Act made the City and County of Philadelphia co-terminous. Indeed, municipal expansion seems to be quite as much the vogue, quite as much the logical sequence of events, quite as much the outgrowth of an inherent Anglo-Saxon instinct, as national expansion.

This development has not been confined to population and territory, but has extended to municipal functions as well. In 1800, if an American city provided for paving the streets and cleansing them of the grosser and fouler impurities; for a few night watchmen and a handful of constables; for cleaning and repairing the sewers and docks; and for lighting the streets with miserable oil-lamps, its 'Fathers' thought that they were performing their whole duty to the inhabitants.

According to a recent authority (Parsons, in 'Municipal Monopolies', 1898), the various courts of this country have decided that the following are now proper public purposes and proper objects of municipal control and ownership: "Roads, bridges, sidewalks, sewers, ferries, markets, scales, wharves, canals, parks, baths, schools, libraries, museums, hospitals, lodging houses, poorhouses, jails, cemeteries, prevention of fire, supply of water, gas, electricity, heat, power, transportation, telegraph and telephone service, clocks, skating-rinks, musical entertainments, exhibitions of fireworks, tobacco warehouses, employment offices."

We have made but a beginning, however, according to the testimony of another recent writer (Dr. Milo E. Maltbie, in 'Municipal Functions', page 784), who says:

"Whither is all this tending? Whatever a few years since may have been the answer suggested by conservatism, there is to-day but one, and that so obvious as scarcely to be questioned. The extension of municipal functions in the direction in which the city is to act as the servant of the individual has barely begun; and its scope, certain to be indefinitely increased in a comparatively near future, is to be measured only by the resources of developing invention and enterprise, so rapidly developing of late that their early realization will be such as to be unthinkable now. The individual will have cheap facilities for transport and communication. The product of his labor will be multiplied in advantage to him by the cooperation for which cities alone give a chance. He will not be left to the hard paths which chance may afford for education of his mind and his senses, but have this facilitated by every device of civilization. It is, therefore, natural, inevitable, indeed, that there should be provided for him first, water, the prime essential of life and health; next, the first of its conveniences—artificial light; later, those universal incidents of its