Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/385

Rh slightly instead of being the other way around. Public improvements also are not affected by the war agitation.

And the same is said in Hartford, where there is no evidence that the foreign situation has diverted attention from public welfare.

In the Middle Atlantic states the same general situation may be said to prevail. Let me quote from just two letters: one from Harrisburg, Pa., and one from Wilmington, Del. From the former we learn that, so far as careful observation goes, while the war is undoubtedly attracting considerable attention,

it is not materially distracting the attention of our citizens from the business they have in hand. Whether it will cause the holding up of public improvements can hardly be determined before next spring, the time for starting new work in this direction, and I should think would depend upon intervening war developments and the conditions of the money market at that time.

A Wilmington editor

can not see any indications that the war in Europe is retarding the development of interest in municipal conditions to any appreciable extent. Certainly it is attracting interest in an extraordinary manner. At the primaries thus far held there has been about the average expression of popular interest in the size of the vote and the selection of candidates. I do not believe, therefore, it will have any detrimental effect upon the election by blinding the attention of interested citizens to the need of careful voting. Indeed, there has been a notable instance to this effect in the repudiation, by a county caucus of the Republican state convention, of a brawling ring politician who sought preferment by getting a place on the state committee.

There is not any probability of the war influence affecting public improvements adversely. Work on our greatest improvement—the joint city and county building—is progressing finely. Private building operations are going on as usual.

These views selected from a great mass of correspondence are typical, and unquestionably reflect the fact that the American municipal citizen, while profoundly interested in every phase of the greatest of modern wars, nevertheless is going about his municipal business just about the same as usual, but with somewhat more care and thoughtfulness than formerly, and, perhaps, with a greater concern about beginning improvements, and about their execution, when once determined upon.

Generally speaking, the influence by and large of the European war on these phases of American municipal life has been much less than had been reasonably anticipated.

Nor has the war interfered with the orderly functioning of the cities. While there has been a natural conservation in the undertaking of new work and the assumption of new functions, so far as reported, there has been no abandonment of those lines of activities previously assumed, and regularly carried on. It must be pointed out, however, that if it had not been for the war, the new year would have seen the greatest development of municipal activity the country has ever