PROBLEMS OF MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATION 



BY JANE ADDAMS 



[Jane Addams, Head of Hull House Settlement, Chicago, b. Cedarville, Illinois, 

 September 6, 1860. B.A. Rockford College; LL.D. University of Wisconsin. 

 President of Hull House Association since 1889. Author of part of Philan- 

 thropy and Social Progress; Democracy and Social Ethics.] 



WE are accustomed to say that the machinery of government 

 incorporated in the charters of the early American cities, as in the 

 federal and state constitutions, was worked out by men who were 

 strongly under the influence of the historians and doctrinaires of 

 the eighteenth century. The most significant representative of 

 these men is Thomas Jefferson, whose foresight and genius we 

 are here to commemorate, and their most telling phrase is the 

 familiar opening that " all men are created free and equal." 



We are only now, however, beginning to suspect that the present 

 admitted failure in municipal administration, the so-called " shame 

 of American cities," may be largely due to the inadequacy of those 

 eighteenth-century ideals, with the breakdown of the machinery 

 which they provided, and, further, to the weakness inherent in the 

 historic and doctrinaire method when it attempts to deal with 

 growing and human institutions. 



These men were the legitimate successors of the seventeenth- 

 century Puritans in their devotion to pure principle, but they had 

 read poets and philosophers unknown to the Pilgrim fathers, and 

 represented that first type of humanitarian who loves the people 

 without really knowing them, which is by no means an impossible 

 achievement. " The love of those whom a man does not know is 

 quite as elemental a sentiment as the love of those whom a man 

 does know," but with this difference, that he expects the people 

 whom he does not know to forswear altogether the right of going 

 their own way, and to be convinced of the beauty and value of his 

 way. 



Because their idealism was of the type that is afraid of experience, 

 these founders of our American cities refused to look at the diffi- 

 culties and blunders which a self-governing people was sure to 

 encounter, and insisted that the people would walk only in the paths 

 of justice and righteousness. It was inevitable, therefore, that they 

 should have remained quite untouched by that worldly wisdom 

 which counsels us to know life as it is, and by that very modern 

 belief that, if the world is ever right at all, it must go right in its 

 own way. 



