Obstacles to Municipal Progress1

The strange divergence between what city dwellers know and what they do collectively, must bewilder even the student of politics. Common sense and public conduct still seem rather distant acquaintances. That haughty baron, municipal practice, even now often fails to recognize municipal science when they meet. Great public works continue to be located and constructed, costly and inconvenient systems of collection and distribution persist, almost as if city planning related to the moon. We know that smoke is both unnecessary and wasteful, but it continues to darken our days and corrode our lungs. We shut our eyes to fetid slums, bad housing, and over-crowding, but lavish millions on new hospitals, asylums, and prisons in which to store their obvious product. Axioms of administration, universally accepted, are applied everywhere except to cities. There the citizen generously permits partisan considerations to determine rewards and punishment for the municipal personnel, at the same time grumbling bitterly about inefficiency. Indeed the sacrifice of cities in general to the national parties is still the rule rather than the exception, in spite of all the preaching and the shouting. A thousand strange futilities and follies continue to irritate and puzzle us, a multitude of unnecessary evils to reduce our enjoyment of life.