MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT. 61 



familiar and have been so frequently exploited as to obviate the neces- 

 sity of repetition. The papers are and have been full of Metropolitan 

 Boston, Greater New York, Greater Chicago, Greater Jersey City, 

 Greater Newark — Philadelphia has been Greater Philadelphia since 

 1854, when the Consolidation Act made the City and County of Phila- 

 delphia co-terminous. Indeed, municipal expansion seems to be quite 

 as much the vogue, quite as much the logical sequence of events, quite 

 as much the outgrowth of an inherent Anglo-Saxon instinct, as national 

 expansion. 



This development has not been confined to population and terri- 

 tory, but has extended to municipal functions as well. In 1800, if 

 an American city provided for paving the streets and cleansing them 

 of the grosser and fouler impurities; for a few night watchmen and a 

 handful of constables; for cleaning and repairing the sewers and docks; 

 and for lighting the streets with miserable oil-lamps, its 'Fathers' 

 thought that they were performing their whole duty to the inhabitants. 



According to a recent authority (Parsons, in 'Municipal Monopolies', 

 1898), the various courts of this country have decided that the fol- 

 lowing are now proper public purposes and proper objects of municipal 

 control and ownership: "Roads, bridges, sidewalks, sewers, ferries, 

 markets, scales, wharves, canals, parks, baths, schools, libraries, 

 museums, hospitals, lodging houses, poorhouses, jails, cemeteries, pre- 

 vention of fire, supply of water, gas, electricity, heat, power, transpor- 

 tation, telegraph and telephone service, clocks, skating-rinks, musical 

 entertainments, exhibitions of fireworks, tobacco warehouses, employ- 

 ment offices." 



We have made but a beginning, however, according to the testi- 

 mony of another recent writer (Dr. Milo E. Maltbie, in 'Municipal 

 Functions', page 784), who says: 



"Whither is all this tending? Whatever a few years since may 

 have been the answer suggested by conservatism, there is to-day but 

 one, and that so obvious as scarcely to be questioned. The extension 

 of municipal functions in the direction in which the city is to act as 

 the servant of the individual has barely begun; and its scope, certain 

 to be indefinitely increased in a comparatively near future, is to be 

 measured only by the resources of developing invention and enterprise, 

 so rapidly developing of late that their early realization will be such as 

 to be unthinkable now. The individual will have cheap facilities for 

 transport and communication. The product of his labor will be mul- 

 tiplied in advantage to him by the cooperation for which cities alone 

 give a chance. He will not be left to the hard paths which chance 

 may afford for education of his mind and his senses, but have this 

 facilitated by every device of civilization. It is, therefore, natural, 

 inevitable, indeed, that there should be provided for him first, water, 

 the prime essential of life and health; next, the first of its conveniences 

 — artificial light; later, those universal incidents of its growth — high- 



