212 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
extravagances, but what he has said of a modern city is true. It is, indeed, a place " where summer and winter are only alterna- tives of heat and cold ; where snow never fell white, nor sunshine clear ; where the ground is only a pavement, and the sky no more than a glass roof of an arcade; where the utmost power of a storm is to choke the gutters, and the finest magic of spring to change mud into dust." We read of the " downward draft " in the cities; that they must be recruited from the country; that their mortality is at least 20 per cent, greater than in the rural districts. This is only another way of saying that life in a city tends to physical and moral degeneration. Now, the relative population of our cities is rapidly growing larger. How much greater will be the effect on the nation when we are practically an urban people? Obviously, if the conditions of the cities remain the same, there will be a distinct degeneration of the people, as a royal commission recently reported of Scotland. In England three-fourths of the population live in cities. The vitalizing current from the country grows less and less, and, in spite of improvements in municipal administration, the people of England are declining in strength and vigor. This was shown at the recruiting offices for the recent war in South Africa. Only about a third of those applying for service were physically fit. It is a plain inference, too, from the appearance and condition of the English working-people. The average life of the English laborer, who, of course, suffers most from the evils of city life, is only twenty-two years. An English city is not very different from an American city. The effects upon human life are essen- tially the same. In Massachussetts cities, for instance, the aver- age life of a common factory operative is thirty-six and three- tenths years, while that of a farmer is sixty-five and three-tenths years.
Obviously, then, there is a great opportunity for the city to promote the economy of one of its best assets, namely, the physi- cal life of its people. Perhaps half the deaths of cities are due to diseases that are preventable. If our municipal authorities should devote half as much time and thought to the physical wel- fare of the people as they ordinarily do to politics, mortality
