In conclusion we would emphasize again that the era of the city is just beginning; that a larger and larger proportion of our population must come to live in the cities, and that, therefore, the city will dominate the society of the future. Hence, humanity must solve the problem of the city if social progress is to continue. And the problem is by no means insoluble. Man is not yet adjusted to city life. The city is so new even to civilized man that he has carried into it the habits which he practiced in isolated rural communities. These are the sources of trouble in our cities, and, as we have already seen, new adjustments have to be made by individuals in order to secure harmonious social relationships under the crowded conditions of the city. The city requires, therefore, a higher degree of intelligence on the part of the individual than the rural social life, and a great part of the solution of the problem of the city must come through the development of such higher intelligence and morality by means of education. At any rate, it is foolish to decry the city or to attempt to stop its growth. That is impossible and, we think, undesirable. The ideal social life of man has never been the isolated life of the rural community. The city has always been in a sense man's ideal, as is shown by the fact that nearly all attempts to depict a perfect human society have been pictures of cities. Man's ideal, as Dr. Weber says, is not the city or the country, but the city and the country blended, and this is what the city of the future should become. No doubt the time will come when present cities will be looked back upon with horror, as we look back on eighteenth-century cities. The city of the future need not present any of the hideous, disagreeable, and unwholesome aspects of our present cities. The city can be made, through science and morality, a place in which human beings may find their ideal society.
SELECT REFERENCES
For brief reading:
WEBER, Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century.
WILCOX, The American City.
ZUEBLIN, American Municipal Progress.
For more extended reading:
FAIRLIE, Municipal Administration.
HOWE, The City: the Hope of Democracy.
PARSONS, The City for the People.
ROWE, Problems of City Government.
STRONG, The Challenge of the City.
CHAPTER XII
POVERTY AND PAUPERISM
While the many social problems arising from the presence in society of abnormal or socially unadjusted classes, namely, the dependent, defective, and delinquent classes, cannot be discussed in this book adequately, yet they must be briefly noticed in order to correlate them with other social problems, and even more in order to call the attention of the student to the vast literature which exists concerning these problems.
Definitions of Poverty and Pauperism.—Poverty is a relative term, difficult to define, but as generally employed in sociological writings at the present it means that economic and social state in which persons have not sufficient income to maintain health and physical efficiency. All who do not receive a sufficient income to maintain the minimum standard of living necessary for efficiency are known as the "poor," or are said to live below the poverty line.