The Anaconda standard. [volume] (Anaconda, Mont.) 1889-1970, 1898-02-28
THE PATERNAL CITY.
The Many Ways in Which Life May BE
Made More Heaithful.

From the Minneapolis Times.
That the city of the future is to be
very different thing from the city or
the present is as certain as that the
human race is to advance. Nobody be-
lieves that ourextravagant expenditures
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
mass as for themselves individually.
Nobody believes that the operations of
the board of health will be so feeble as
to allow barking dogs, braying dom
keys, Growing cocks, jangling bells,
shrieking steam whistles and smoking
chimneys to be harbored in the quar-
tiers of a dense population, or watered
milk to be sold, as ii 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
~ attentions of every passing dog.
Nobody believes that quarts of thingsa
will be openly sold that only measure
a pint, or liquids sold in bottles that
have a big hump underneath that will
crowd one couple of gills, or coal be
sold as a ton that weighs 1,5OO pounds.
Nobody believes that in so years from
now a whole street will have to be torn
up whenever a drain is to be repaired.
or water is to be put into house, or a
gas or sewer connection is to be made,
or telephone wires to be introduced.
Nobody believes that in so years hum
dreds of thousands of people will be liv
ing as families in single rooms, in our
big cities, some of the rooms unlighted
and none of them sufficiently ventilated.
When it is shown, as it is by statisti-
clans, that the death rate among people
in the tenements is over 1853 to the thou
sand, as compared with a rate of less
than five and one-half in the thousand
among the people who live in clean
tf.n,A
date 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 the
evils under which the cities suffer are
capable of amending, and at slight eX-
pense, is clear enough. When it is real
lied 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 operates
against life itself to tolerate the tene-
ment system and the sweating system,
a free people will insist upon the strict
est regulation of those things by law.
Reform is coming in many ways.
Our principal streets are no longer
made hdeous with regard to ragged
poles and overhead wires. In a few
years more we shall have the Paris
system of tunnels beneath the streets
for the accommodation of sewers, wa
ter pipes, steam pipes, gas pipes, tele-
graph. telephone and electric wires, so
that repairs and extensions can be
made without stopping travel or per-
manently marring the smoothness and
neatness of our streets. These are but
examples and indications of many re-
forms that will soon be compulsory in
all our American cities