422 MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATION 



regarded as divine visitations. Political economy, social science, 

 and bacteriology had not entered into the vital consciousness of 

 men. And thus the conditions with which municipal activity in 

 our time has been most deeply concerned, were in those periods for 

 the most part disregarded. 



There were, to be sure, other aspects in which towns and their life 

 were of much significance. The seaport towns were the centers of 

 maritime trade, and many of them became rich and famous through 

 traffic and merchandise. Witness the Hansa towns, Venice, and 

 many another. Other cities, as centers of governing activity and as 

 capitals of kings or of princes or grand dukes, had distinctions and 

 splendors that have furnished them with a continuity of life very 

 dignified and ennobling. Most or all of the old-time towns had their 

 organizations or guilds of handicraftsmen, these in the aggregate 

 constituting a free citizen or burgher body, which body in turn had 

 secured from the reigning authority a charter or grant of communal 

 privilege and corporate self-direction. 



The municipal corporations thus formed almost invariably had 

 their old town halls centrally placed on the market square and of 

 imposing and beautiful civic architecture. The survival of great 

 numbers of these old buildings as centers of a wholly new kind of 

 municipal corporate activity helps not a little to carry the mind 

 in imagination over the chasm that separates medieval from modern 

 ways of life, thought, and action. But, although in the case of 

 many towns there has been unbroken use for several centuries of 

 town halls and other appurtenances of the Gemeinde, or organized 

 community, and although also in many cases there has been legally 

 no break in the continuity of the incorporated municipal body, there 

 has in reality come about a change not merely profound, but alto- 

 gether revolutionary in the characteristics of town life and in the 

 aims and methods of the municipal corporations themselves. It is 

 in this sense that Vienna is new rather than old, and that the thriving 

 urban communities of the Rhine Valley are of as recent development 

 as those in the Mississippi Valley. 



For a considerable time, as I have said, after the development of 

 the factory system and the building of railroads had brought us 

 fairly into the midst of present-day conditions, in which popu- 

 lation is everywhere forming in the new urban groups with which 

 we are now concerned, for a considerable time this re-grouping 

 was regarded even by those who extolled the new agencies of produc- 

 tion and the new implements of exchange, as a thing deeply to be 

 deplored by reason of attending ills that seemed beyond remedy. 

 Those ills went farther than the physical maladies that invalided 

 the workers and crowded the cemeteries. Town life seemed to foster 

 every sort of crime and vice, and to threaten the swift decay of civic 



