PROBLEMS OF MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATION 435 



A man of this generation easily discerns the crudeness of that 

 eighteenth-century conception of essentially unprogressive human 

 nature, in all the empty dignity of its " inborn rights of man," 

 because he has grown familiar with a more passionate human creed, 

 w r ith the modern evolutionary conception of the slowly advancing 

 race whose rights are not " inalienable," but are hard won in the 

 tragic processes of civilization. Were self-government to be inaugu- 

 rated by the advanced men of the present moment, as the founders 

 were doubtless the advanced men of their time, they would make 

 the most careful research into those early organizations of village 

 communities, folkmotes, and mirs, those primary cells of both social 

 and political organization where the people knew no difference 

 between the two, but quite simply met to consider in common dis- 

 cussion all that concerned their common life. They would investi- 

 gate the craft guilds and artels, which combined government with 

 daily occupation, as did the self-governing university and free town. 

 They would seek for the connection between the liberty-loving 

 medieval city and its free creative architecture, that most social of 

 all the arts. 



But our eighteenth-century idealists, unconscious of the com- 

 pulsions of origins and of the fact that self-government had an 

 origin of its own, timidly took the English law as their prototype, 

 " whose very root is in the relation between sovereign and subject, 

 between lawmaker and those whom the law restrains," and which 

 has traditionally concerned itself more with the guarding of pre- 

 rogative and with the rights of property than with the spontaneous 

 life of the people. They serenely incorporated laws and survivals 

 which registered the successful struggle of the barons against the 

 aggression of the sovereign, although the new country lacked both 

 nobles and kings. Misled by the name of government, they founded 

 their new cities by an involuntary reference to a lower social state 

 than that which they actually saw about them. They depended 

 upon penalties, coercion, compulsion, and remnants of military 

 codes to hold the community together; and it may be possible to 

 trace much of the maladministration of our cities to these survivals, 

 to the fact that our early democracy was a moral romanticism, 

 rather than a well-grounded belief in social capacity and in the effi- 

 ciency of the popular will. 



It has further happened that, as the machinery, groaning under 

 the pressure of the new social demand put upon it, has broken down 

 from time to time, we have mended it by giving more power to 

 administrative officers, distrusting still further the will of the people. 

 We are willing to cut off the dislocated part, or tighten the gearing, 

 but we are afraid to substitute a machine of newer invention and 

 greater capacity. 



