THE INFLUENCE OF URBAN AND RURAL ENVIRONMENT 349 



111 1890 only 33 per cent of the people of the United 

 States hved in cities, but the shift from farm to factory, 

 from village to town has been at an increasing rate until 

 today not less than ^^ per cent of our total population of 

 120,000,000 are city dwellers. Among the eleven and a 

 half milhon people of the State of New York, 85 per cent 

 are classed as urban. In Dakota 86.4 per cent of the people 

 are rural. 



What is the effect on human life of moving from farm, 

 forest and shore, where a square mile of continental United 

 States shelters and supports 17.3 persons (40 per square mile 

 for total urban and rural) to the metropolitan area of 

 New York where there are 14,438 persons in the same unit 

 of area, and where there are in many regions of the city 

 300 to 400 persons living on the acre, or 224,000 on the 

 square mile area? 



It is the very best, not merely the average, quality of 

 life which we strive for, as well as for a greater length or 

 quantity. It is the satisfactions of human life, the function 

 of enjoyment, not merely the status of material existence 

 or survival we try to attain. Any index of success in man's 

 gradual or forced adaptation from his so-called natural, 

 his primeval or ancient manner of life to the prevailing 

 trial or test of existence in great community aggregations 

 will prove incomplete and inadequate unless it includes a 

 spiritual as well as a physical element. However successful 

 the historians and philosophers of tomorrow may be in 

 evaluating the relative merits of our present preference for 

 mass existence as distinguished from the family or unitary 

 life of our but recent ancestors, we can at least relate today 

 those differences and similarities of record which characterize 

 the lives and deaths of city and country residents. 



MODERN MUNICIPAL SANITATION 



It was not until such alert and analytical citizens as 

 Chadwick in England and Shattuck and Stephen Smith in 

 Massachusetts and New York began to study the balance 

 sheet of their fellow citizens that the desperate plight of the 

 town dweller was made known. Cities could not grow or 



