Science in Public Affairs 



citizen found himself able to initiate a cycle of 

 transmutations, and to carry it on up to a certain 

 point, after which it appeared that the cycle com- 

 pleted itself automatically. This sort of scientific 

 magic transformed coal into power to make cheap 

 goods for the consumption of cheap labourers, and 

 the cheap labour then applied itself to coal to pro- 

 duce more power to make more cheap goods for 

 the consumption of still cheaper labourers, and 

 so on indefinitely. This ever-extending series of 

 transformations evidently reaches its culmination 

 in the growth of an ideal city like East London, 

 which so magnificently surpasses all other cities 

 in its accumulated reservoir of cheap labour. Such 

 are the ideals of civic policy which tend to work 

 themselves out in fact and history, if not in word 

 and theory, when city development gets arrested 

 at the stage of Town. 



VIII 



Unfair as it would be to English, not less would 

 it be to American civilisation as a whole, to impute 

 to it the conception of civic status restricted to the 

 limitations of the railway engineer or even of the 

 Chamber of Commerce. The United States is 

 not only the country of railway cities and rail- 

 way kings, it is also the country par excellence, 

 of schools, universities, and educationists. The 

 American " School-ma'rm " balances the American 

 Viking, and the world trembles in the hope and 

 expectation that some day she may succeed in 



238 



