River Falls journal. [volume] (River Falls, Pierce County, Wis.) 1872-2019, 1898-03-24
THE PATERNAL CITY.
Many Ways I'm Which Life May BE
Mnde More HenIIhfmI.

Made More HeaIthfui.
That the city of the future is to be
very different thing from the city of
the present is as certain as that the
human race is to advance. Nobody be-
lieves that our eXtravagant eXpendi-
lures for light, for instance, are to be
kept up, because a time is coming when
the people will demand the same sort
and amount of service for themselves
in a mass as for themselves individu-
ally.
Nobody believes that the operations
of the board of health will be so feeble
as to allow barking dogs, braying don
keys, growing cocks, jangling bells,
shrieling steam whistles and smoking
chimneys to be harbored in the quar-
tiers of dense population, or watered
milk to be sold, as it now is, or things
intended to be used for food to be put
on the sidewalks, exposed to the dust
and filth of the streets, and the friend
ly attentions of every passing dog. No
body believes that parts of things will
I've openly sold that only measure pint,
or liquids sold in bottles that have
big hump underneath that will crowd
out a couple of gills, or coal be sold as
u ton that weighs 800 pounds.
Nobody believes that in so years
from now a whole street will have to be
torn up whenever a drain is to be re-
paired, or water is to be put into a
house, or a gas or sewer connection is
to be made, or telephone wires to be
introduced. Nobody believes that in
so years hundreds of thousands of peo
pie will be living as families in single
rooms, in our big cities, some of the
rooms unlighted and none of them suf-
ficiently ventilated. When it is shown,
as it is by statisticians, that the death
rate among people in the tenements
is over 163 to the 1000, as compared
with a rate of less than So in the 1000
among the people who live in clean
houses, it becomes question of inn
mediate Importance whether the city
is doing its duty by not at once closing
these moral and political as well as
social and material pest holes.
Americans are slow to accept any
more government than is necessary,
but once it is resolved upon, no people
are more obedient to it. That many of
IDe evils unUeF WHICH Ine Clues suffer
are capable of amending, and at slight
expense, is clear enough. When it is
realized that the neglect of obvious
duty has a deterrent effect upon right,
as in the case of the grocer or butcher
and milk merchant, who are allowed to
cheat or to offer soiled and tainted
food when it is shown that it has an
i'll effect upon health to confine chill
dren in overcrowded schoolrooms and
unventilated factories; when it is
shown that it operates against life
itself to tolerate the tenement system
and the sweating system, a free people
will insist upon the strictest regulation
of those things by law.
Reform is coming in many ways. Our
principal streets are no longer made
hideous with ragged poles and over
head wires. In a few years more we
shall have the Paris system of tun-
nels beneath the streets for the ac-
commodation of sewers, water pipes,
steam pipes, gas pipes, telegraph, tele
phone and electric wires, so that re-
pairs and extensions can be made with
out stopping travel or permanently
marring the smoothness and neatness
of streets. These are but examples and
indications of many reforms that will
soon be compulsory in all our Amer
lean cities.-Minneapo Tribune.