432 MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATION 



What I hold is that the problems are now defined, the remedies 

 are fairly understood, and the work can progress with good courage. 

 We have, in the United States, made enormous progress since, more 

 than twenty years ago, Mr. Bryce made the studies which are em- 

 bodied in the chapters of his American Commonwealth that relate 

 to our city life. In some respects the very best illustrations of the 

 triumphs and the difficulties of American urban life are afforded 

 by this great city of St. Louis that has grown up as the chief center 

 of the states formed out of the Louisiana Purchase territory. There 

 have been evils and scandals in its municipal governmental career 

 that have of late been widely advertised to the world. I have, on 

 the other hand, known something for years past of other phases 

 of its municipal life, and I must assert that, in the main, it stands 

 not only as a creditable, but as a brilliant, example of modern munici- 

 pal progress. It has at least managed to make a comfortable and 

 a beautiful dwelling-place for its inhabitants, and to provide for 

 them those facilities that contribute to the safety and enjoyment 

 of life. 



Here, as elsewhere in America just now, --as in Chicago, San 

 Francisco, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and many another city, 

 - the most important phase of municipal life is the struggle for 

 a higher type of civic virtue. This is coming about in the gradual 

 detachment of what we may call " municipal politics " from the 

 domination of the national and the state politics, which have no 

 proper place in the direction of the corporate activities of towns and 

 cities. 



In spite of the difficulties that I have mentioned, there is some 

 tendency to improvement in the structure of municipal government. 

 There is almost revolutionary improvement and progress in the 

 application of American prosperity and advanced material civiliza- 

 tion to the appointments of town life. Finally, there is also unques- 

 tionable progress in the direction of civic honesty. It need not be 

 said that with the massing of population in the urban centers it 

 becomes almost a question of life or death for the state itself that 

 the citizenship of the populous communities be at least of as high 

 a grade and standard, as fit for the exercise of the privileges of 

 democracy, as the citizenship of the rural neighborhoods. But for 

 the rapidity with which we have received and enfranchised masses 

 of non-English-speaking immigrants who have for the most part 

 taken up their homes in our cities, I believe we should already have 

 brought the standards of civic life in our towns up to the average 

 of the country at large. As to the future, I have no doubts at all 

 upon this score. 



In British, German, and other European industrial centers, the 

 greatest difficulties that now have to be faced grow out of the pov- 



