People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 August 1893 — THEY LACK HOMOGENEITY. [ARTICLE]

THEY LACK HOMOGENEITY.

How the Growth of Our American Cities Is Greatly Curbed. , The great trouble with American municipal government, writes Barr Ferree in the Engineering Magazine, is the lack of homogeneity in the growth of great cities. Each city starts out independently and on a better plan than any other, and yet with very little thought of profiting by the experiences of older ones. American politicians are apt to plume themselves on the advances they have made in their own departments, and some even go so far as to point with pride to the growth of their particular city. Yet with all our boasted progress the fact remains that the best governed cities, the most ablj* developed and thoroughly broadened municipalities are the old cities of the new world, in which the necessity for new growth and complete change from the old have been so wholly recognized as to compel the introduction of a new order of affairs. Nothing of the sort is to be seen in even the most active communities in America. New Ydrk cannot annex other districts because local politicians interpose objections which have no foundation save the‘r own selfishness. Boston is hemmed in with so-called rival municipalities that hug their civil privileges and imagined independence with absurd pretensions of might and power. Philadelphia has, in truth, added vastly to her territory and stands quite distinct among seaboard cities m this respect, but she is wanting in the metropolitan spirit and capability of development which alone would make this increase of territory valuable. In the west a different feeling may be noted, and this, as well as their more rapid rate of increase, tends to make our western cities more prosperous, as well as more modern, than our eastern.