The age-herald., 1898-02-12
THE EXTERNAL CITY.
What the Progress of Municipal Reform May
 Come To.

From the Minneapolis Tribune.
 That the city of the future is to be a very different thing from the city of the present Is as certain as that the human race is to advance. Nobody believes that our extravagant expenditures for light, for instance are to be kept up, because a time is coming when the people will de- mand the same sort and amount of ser vice for themselves in mass as for them selves individually. Nobody believes that the operations of the board of health will be so feeble as to allow barking dogs, brayingdonkeys, crowink cocks, dangling bells, shrieking steam whistles and smok- ing chimneys to be harbored in the quar- ters of a dense population, or watered milk to be sold as it now is, or things in- tended to be used for food to be put on the sidewalks, exposed to the dust and filth of the streets, and the friendly at tentions of every passing dog. Nobody believes that quarts of things will be open ly sold that only measure pint, or liquids sold in bottles that have big hump un- derneath that will crowd out a couple of gils, or coal to be sold as a ton that weighs 1,50O pounds. Nobody believes that in fifty 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 a house, or a gas or sewer connec- tion is to be made, or telephone wires to
 
 fifty 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 sufficiently ventilated. When it is shown, as 1t is by statisticians, that the death rate among people in the tenements is over 163 to the thousand, as compared with a rate of less than five and one-half in the thousand among the people who leave in clean houses, it becomes a question of immedi- ate importance whether the city is doing it's duty by not at once closing these moral and political well 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 obedi- ent to it. That many of the evils under which the cities suffer are capable of amending, and at slight expense, is clear enough. When it is realized that the neg lect of obvious duty has a deterrent eff uG upon right, as in the case of the grocer or butcher and milk merchant, who are al- lowed to cheat or to offer soiled and taint- ed food; when it is shown that 1t has an i'll effect upon health to confne children in overcrowded schoolrooms and unventilated factories; when it is shown that it operates system and the sweating system, a free people will insist upon the strictest regula- tion of those things by law.
 Reform is coming in many ways. Our principal streets are no longer made hid eous with 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, water pipes. steam pipes gas pipes, tele- graph, telephone and electric wires, so that repairs and extensions can be made with out stopping travel or permanently mar ring the smoothness and neatness of strets These are but examples and indications of many reforms that will soon be compul- sorry in all our American cities.