446 MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATION 



As the juvenile courts are beginning to take an interest in the 

 social life of the child, in order to prevent arrest, on the same princi- 

 ple the reform schools are inaugurating the most advanced education 

 in agriculture and manual arts. A bewildered foreign parent comes 

 from time to time to Hull House, asking that his boy be sent to a 

 school to learn farming, basing his request upon the fact that his 

 neighbor's boy has been sent to " a nice green country place." 

 It is carefully explained that the neighbor's boy was bad, and was 

 arrested and sent away because of his badness, and it is quite pos- 

 sible sometimes to make clear to the man that the city assumes that 

 he is looking out for himself and taking care of his own boy; but 

 it ought to be further possible to make him see that, if he feels that 

 his son needs the education of a farm school, it lies with him to 

 agitate the subject and to vote for the candidate who will secure 

 such schools. He might well look amazed, were this advice ten- 

 dered him, for these questions have never been presented to him to 

 vote upon. Because he does not easily discuss the tariff, or other 

 remote subjects, which the political parties present to him from 

 time to time, we assume that he is not to be trusted to vote on the 

 education of his child; and in Chicago, at least, the school board is 

 not elective. The ancestors of this same immigrant, from the days 

 of bows and arrows, doubtless taught their children those activities 

 which seemed valuable to them. 



Again, we build enormous city hospitals and almshouses for 

 the defective and dependent, but for that great mass of people just 

 beyond the line from which they are constantly recruited we do 

 practically nothing. We are afraid of the notion of governmental 

 function which would minister to the primitive needs of the mass 

 of people, although we are quite ready to care for him whom mis- 

 fortune or disease has made the exception. It is really the rank 

 and file, the average citizen, who is ignored by government, while 

 he works out his real problems through other agencies, and is scolded 

 for staying at home on election day. 



It is comparatively easy to understand the punitive point of 

 view, which seeks to suppress, or the philanthropic, which seeks 

 to palliate; but it is much more difficult to formulate that city 

 government which is adapted to our present normal living. As 

 over against the survival of the first two, excellent and necessary 

 as they are, we have the many municipal activities of which Mr. 

 Shaw has told us, but we have attained them surreptitiously, as it 

 were, by means of appointed commissions, through boards of health 

 endowed with exceptional powers, or through the energy of a mayor 

 who has pushed his executive function beyond the charter limit. 

 The people themselves have not voted on these measures, and they 

 have lost both the education and the nourishing of the democratic 



