What broad basis has been laid down for a modification of their most genuine and pressing needs through their own initiative ? The traditional Government expresses its activity in keeping the streets clean and the district lighted and policed. It is only during the last quarter of a century that the London County Council ( 88) erected decent houses, public baths, and many other devices for the purer social life of the people. American cities have gone no further, although they presumably started at representation a hundred years ago, so completely were the founders misled by the name of government, and the temptation to substitute the form of political democracy for real selfgovernment dealing with advancing social ideals. Even now London has twenty-eight Borough Councils, in addition to the London County Council itself, fifteen hundred direct representatives of the people, as over against seventy in Chicago although the latter city has a population one-half as large. Paris has twenty Mayors, with corresponding machinery for local government, as over against the New York concentration in one huge City Hall, too often corrupt.
In Germany, perhaps more than anywhere else, the government has come to concern itself with the primitive essential needs of its working people.
In their behalf, the Government has forced industry, in the person of the large manufacturers, to make an alliance with it. The manufacturers are taxed for accident insurance of workingmen, for old-age pensions and sick benefits; and a project is being formed in which they shall bear the large share of insurance against ( 89) non-employment when it has been made clear that non-employment is the result of an economic crisis brought about through the mal-administration of finance.
Germany proposes to regulate the maximum amount of rent which landlords of certain types of houses may be permitted to require, quite as the usury laws limit the maximum amount of interest which may be demanded. And yet in' dustry in Germany has flourished, and this control on behalf of the normal workingman as he faces life in his daily vocation has apparently not checked its systematic growth, nor limited its place in the world's market. As a result of this constant supervision of industry, the German police although a part of a military government, are constantly employed in the regulation of social affairs; and in these branches of government it is remarked that they are dropping their military tone and assuming toward the people the attitude of helpers and protectors. The police force in Germany is the lowest executive organ of the interior government and there are, therefore, as many kinds of police departments as there are different departments in this interior government. They follow the Government inspectors of the forest, the railways, the fields and roads, to see that their instructions are obeyed. In the De-( 90)-partment of Public Health it is the police officers who finally enforce instructions in regard to vaccination, meat inspection, sale of food-stuffs, and the transportation of animals; in the department of factory inspection the police not only enforce the provisions of the factory laws, but they are responsible for the books in which the wages paid to minors are recorded; and it is from the police stations that the cards of the Government insurance for working-people are issued. Any special investigation ordered by the legislature is, as a matter of course, undertaken by the police. These varied activities, of course, require men of education and ability, and the very extension of function has broken down the military ideal in the country where that ideal is most firmly intrenched. But in a Republic founded upon a revulsion from oppressive government we still keep the police close to their negative role of preserving order and arresting the criminal. The varied functions they perform in Germany would be impossible in America, because it would be hotly resented by the American business man who will not brook any governmental interference in industrial affairs.
The inherited instinct that government is naturally oppressive, and that its inroads must be checked, has made it a matter of principle and patriotism to keep the functions of government ( 91) more restricted and more military than has become true in military countries.
Almost every Sunday in the Italian quarter in which I live various mutual benefit societies march with fife and drum and with a brave showing of banners, celebrating their achievement in having surrounded themselves by at least a thin wall of protection against disaster, upon having set up their mutual good will against the day of misfortune. These parades have all the emblems of patriotism; indeed, the associations present the primitive core of patriotism, brothers standing by each other against hostile forces from without. I assure you that no Fourth of July celebration, no rejoicing over the birth of an heir to the Italian throne, equals in heartiness and sincerity these ****** celebrations. Again one longs to pour into the government of their adopted country all this affection and zeal, this real patriotism. A system of State insurance would be a very ****** device and secure a large return.
Are we in America retaining eighteenth-century traditions, while Germany is gradually evolving into a Government logically fitted to cope with the industrial situation of the twentieth century? Do we so fail to apprehend what democracy is, that we are really afraid to extend the functions of municipal administration? Have we lost that (92) most conservative of all beliefs -- the belief in the average man, and thereby forfeited Aristotle's ideal of a city "where men live a common life for noble ends"?
