CHAPTER VIII.
PRO-MUNICIPAL WORK.
There will be found in every progressive community societies and organisations which represent a far higher level of public spirit and enterprise than that possessed or displayed by such communities in their collective capacity. It is probable that the government of a community can never reach a higher tone or work on a higher plane than the average sense of that community demands and enforces; and it will greatly conduce to the well-being of any society if the efforts of its State or municipal organisations are inspired and quickened by those of its members whose ideals of society duty rise higher than the average.[1]
And so it may be in Garden City. There will be discovered many opportunities for public service which
- ↑ "Only a proportion of each in one society can have nerve enough to grasp the banner of a new truth, and endurance enough to bear it along rugged and untrodden ways. … To insist on a whole community being made at once to submit to the reign of new practices and new ideas which have just begun to commend themselves to the most advanced speculative intelligence of the time—this, even if it were a possible process, would do much to make life impracticable and to hurry on social dissolution. … A new social state can never establish its ideas unless the persons who hold them confess them openly and give them an honest and effective adherence."—Mr. John Morley, "On Compromise," Chap. v.
