PROBLEMS OF MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATION 44 1
It is comparatively easy to understand the punitive point of view, which seeks to suppress, or the philanthropic, which seeks to palliate; but it is much more difficult to formulate that city government which is adapted to our present normal living. As over against the survival of the first two, excellent and necessary as they are, we have the many municipal activities of which Mr. Shaw has told us, but we have attained them surreptitiously, as it were, by means of appointed commissions, through boards of health endowed with exceptional powers, or through the energy of a mayor who has pushed his executive function beyond the charter limit. The people themselves have not voted on these measures, and they have lost both the education and the nourish- ing of the democratic ideal, which their free discussion would have secured and to which they were more entitled than to the benefits themselves.
In the department of social economy in this exposition is an enormous copy of Charles Booth's monumental survey of the standard of living for the people of London. From his accom- panying twelve volumes may be deduced the occupations of the people, with their real wages, their family budget, their culture- level, and to a certain extent their recreations and spiritual life. If one gives oneself over to a moment of musing on this mass of information, so huge and so accurate, one is almost instinctively aware that any radical changes, so much needed in the blackest and the bluest districts, must largely come from forces outside the life of the people: enlarged mental life from the educationalists, increased wages from the business interests, alleviation of suffer- ing from the philanthropists. What vehicle of correction is pro- vided for the people themselves ? What broad basis has been laid for modification of their most genuine and pressing needs through their own initiative ? What device has been invented for conserv- ing, in the interests of the nation, that kindliness and mutual aid which is the marvel of all charity workers who know the poor? So conservative an economist as Marshall has pointed out that, in the fear of crushing " individual initiative," we every year allow to go to waste untold capacity, talent, and even genius, among the children of the poor, whose parents are unable to shelter them
