The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-05-07

questions of modern industrialism that
 threaten society with them as with us We reed their help and" the guidance
 they .can give us. To take alone the
 problems of the great city of modern times, there is poverty everywhere, but
 for sordid, grinding, hopeless poverty l
 have seen nothing in New York, Pitts
 burg or Chicago that comes anywhere
 near what we have in Lcndon or the
 great industrial cities of England, and
 if this report to our council, in the
 criticisms it makes upon the conditions
 of life in the cities of America, shall draw down upon it the well-merited re- buke, Physician, heal myself" and in
 so doing stimulate the torpor of the
 Englishman to clean hls own slum. l
 shall deem my journey well repaid | In the matter of building and sanita-
 ry legislation, and in it's enforcement in
 the relation of light and air to height of
 buildings perhaps we are in some direc- tions ahead. But 1t is significant fact | that the best of our work was done over | fifty years ago. In the formation of open spaces and squares, in the digni- fled laying out of streets, little is ac-
 complished by comparison with what was done by the great arstocratic faml- lies in London a century ago. Demo- cratic legislation indded seems to be as inefficient in the great cities in Ameri- ca as with US. More inefficient it would often seem as the forces of wealth ap
 pear as rule to range themselves on
 the side of the destruction of civic amenities on the grounr that they ham, per business activity.
 If the first principle of the national trust in England and America is to
 safeguard for the community those mo-
 bier and finer sides of life that go to building up character and point to the
 higher needs of modern democracy It's
 object in the direction of history and
 the records of the past is no less great
 The Russian Jew in Chicago Scandina-
 vian and Irish immigrant in Philadel-
 phia, the German settler in Cincinnati
 the Dutch aristocrat in New York, the
 English gentleman in Virginia, the
 Frenchman in St. Louis, and the pro- geny of the Puritan fathers in Massa- chusetts and Connecticut can never
 have that same looking back on to q history greatly and suprcmely rounded off as is the history of England But our own history after all is that or q congeries of races in which the Scandi- navian, the Celt, the Dutchnan, the Fleming, the German, and the French Huguenot play a conspicuous part and form the noblest clements of citizen ship. America is indeed merely work ing out under newer conditions and on larger scale the problem that has been once solved already.
 To my thinking, one of the greatest dangers in American lifeis the growing spirit of absenteeism that appears to be engendered by the conditions of mod ern industrialism. This is best seen in the life of city like Pittsburg, where it is the object of men to grow rich as soon as possible, so that they may live 1 elsewhere The existence of an arlstoc- racy disconnected from the basis of it's wealth is not a condition that history has at any time, countenanced for long.
 There appear to me also to be other indications in American cities, tending to show that the rapid concentration of wealth and tile waste it engenders iidiiiiS iilG SolhiiiuiiitS er WEI tt' NbS hi- dividual There are signs that it often breeds sense of self f-satisfaction simi- lar to that which we meet with in Eng lish cathedral cities, though there it is with a sense of duty to an es- ta blshed orderAarid which tends to be- come, if unchecked, the most conserva- tive of forces and the greatest impedi- ment to the we'll being of the communi- ty as whole,-a feeling that things are good enough and that plenty is already being done IT have met this In Wash ington, where society Is necessarily | somewhat out of touch with life but I | have felt 1t most in Boston and Phila- !! delphIa It expresses itself differently | in the two cities; in the former 1t tends to take the form that everything that | Is good in the world necessarily cofes from Boston; inythe latter, that nothing | ,an be really good outside of Philadel- phia. I am the freerein making this criticism, because 1t Is In these two cit es that more work has been done in the direction we are aiming than in any others in America I have visited.
 The work before both the English and F he American council from the historical point of view seems to be tpply the best clements in the history of the race to modern citizenship, and to do this, not ,y books, but estheticaly. The history if England is closed chapter, but the development of English democracy, not lone in the island or the different states f the American Union, but throughout he whole British empire and the Eng h-speaking world, is of the future. yo attempt has yet been made to teach istory from the point of view of Eng democracy; to show how institutions have grown up mong the English-speaking people the world. Here we have an