450 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. V. No. 115. 



Municipal Government in Continental Europe. 



Albert Shaw. New York, The Century 



Co. 1895. Pp. 505. 



The energetic editor of the Review of Reviews 

 has embodied in the volume before us the re- 

 sults of much persistent investigation. The 

 facts so industriously collected are sure to be of 

 great value to such of our American municipali- 

 ties as are beginning to struggle towards the 

 light. Whatever be one's opinion regarding 

 the theory of municipal ownership of street 

 railways, lighting plants, ship canals, etc., 

 there can be no doubt that it is both useful and 

 suggestive to have the facts derived from foreign 

 experience made known to us. There will, more- 

 over, be general agreement that we can profit 

 largely by the varied experiments of European 

 towns in municipal sanitation. 



Mr. Shaw's attitude is at times, it must be 

 confessed, one of breathless admiration. The 

 phrases ' bold project,' 'splendid public work,' 

 ' uniformly brilliant results,' punctuate descrip- 

 tions of undertakings and ' achievements ' at 

 which many critics still shake their heads. Can 

 it be, we find ourselves asking, that every mu- 

 nicipality has solved its sanitary problems in just 

 the right way ? Must it not be admitted that 

 not a few European towns are still in the thick 

 of experiment, still groping towards a solution 

 of difficult problems which beset them, still far 

 from confident that the demands of the situation 

 have been really met ? 



Paris, under the caption ' the typical modern 

 •city,' receives by far the most elaborate treat- 

 ment at the hands of our author, and there 

 will be little dissent, we fancy, from his expla- 

 nation in the preface: "lean hardly think 

 that any reader will fail to agree that Paris is 

 the necessary starting point for a description of 

 the modern regime in Continental cities." 

 Here, as in the well-known companion volume, 

 'Municipal Government in Great Britain,'' al- 

 ready reviewed in this Journal, important ques- 

 tions of sanitation are treated as municipal prob- 

 lems of the first magnitude. 



The double service of water supply devised 

 for Paris by M. Belgrand is, perhaps, as Mr. 

 Shaw appeal's ready to believe, theoretically ad- 

 mirable, but in practice it has not been found to 

 work altogether smoothly. The supply of 



spring water has been almost always too scanty 

 and the insufficient quantity has been eked out 

 by the water of the polluted Seine. So well 

 recognized is the injurious etFect of the Seine 

 water that warning is given through the public 

 press when the river water is to be turned into 

 the pipes, and when water from the Seine has 

 been substituted for more than twenty days in 

 the year the householder has the right to a re- 

 duction of rates. The water brought from a 

 distance has, moreover, not proved all that 

 could be desired. An epidemic of typhoid 

 fever, which broke out in Paris in 1894, was 

 traced by the authorities to the supply from the 

 Vanne, in which full confidence had hitherto 

 been placed. We are inclined to demur here 

 at the encomiums bestowed by Mr. Shaw on 

 the double system, and to believe that the day 

 has not come when one may safely predict with 

 him, "In due time * * * the double system 

 will have been carried out in an ideal manner 

 for all Paris." (p. 67.) 



On p. 335 the statement occurs, during the 

 admirable discussion of the functions of the 

 German city, that "the quantity of water used 

 by a city is regarded by British sanitary author- 

 ities as, in a rough way, a measure of its rela- 

 tive civilization." On this point we believe our 

 author missed an admirable opportunity for 

 pointing a moral, a kind of opportunity which, 

 it must be said, he does not often allow to slip un- 

 heeded. The excessive quantity of water ' used ' 

 in the United Sates is not exactly an indication 

 of our superiority in things sanitary. The dis- 

 parity between the quantity of water per capita 

 pumped into the mains in Europe and that sup- 

 plied in the United States is, indeed, little to our 

 credit, although no one will dispute Mr. Shaw's 

 statement that ' ' an abundant supply of pure 

 water, thoroughly distributed, is a vital consider- 

 ation for any city." While London gets along 

 with 44 gallons a head daily, Hamburg with 58, 

 Dresden with 22 and Berlin with 17, New York 

 and Boston must have 92 gallons, Chicago 131, 

 Philadelphia 162, Pittsburg 220 and Allegheny 

 247. It is well known that at least a partial 

 remedy for this condition lies in the introduc- 

 tion of the meter and other devices, and yet 

 this disgraceful waste of water is steadily in- 

 creasing in most large American municipalities 



