210 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
development, its wealth and its natural resources, how can it best utilize these powers for the attainment of the most complete well- being of all its citizens ? The civic problem so stated may indeed be considered a problem of government, providing we under- stand by government, not an external, and more or less independ- ent factor of control, but a ready servant of the people, the active agency through which the collective will of the munici- pality finds expression. But the problem will be more clearly grasped, I suspect, if it is conceived as a problem of the develop- ment and economy of force. This is the character, indeed, of every civic or social problem. The negative phase of the civic problem is how to deal with municipal waste of wealth and life.
The thought of municipal waste is usually limited, I suppose, to the extravagances and corruption of municipal authorities; and this in itself constitutes an enormous leakage and a grave problem. The rapidly accumulating indebtedness of our cities, the increasing annual cost of such government as we have, have been noted with alarm by all students of municipal administra- tion. There is not a city in the country, perhaps, which does not pay more for its government than the service is worth ; which does not support supernumerary or superannuated politicians public functionaries which are either barnacles pure and simple, or rudi- mentary municipal organs as useless, if not as dangerous, in the municipal anatomy as the appendix vermiformis is in the human. The removal of this latter organ is said to be in the way of becoming a fad. Let us hope it will extend to municipal surgery.
Examples of official waste crowd upon the student of the civic problem. I shall present only a single illustration from Chicago. A couple of years ago an investigation of the accounts of the West Town Board and the West Park Board showed that the tax-payers of our city had been for years systematically robbed by the wasteful and extravagant practices of these boards. On one original bond issue of $667,000 interest amounting to $1,160,400 had been paid, and the issue once refunded was half outstanding. The special taxes paid by the people year by year to meet interest and principal had gone chiefly into the pockets of officials, and the estimated waste was about a half million
