demanded by existing conditions? When I speak about the civil service I have two very different pictures in my mind. I think of the employes in the city hall in Berlin, and of the employes in the city hall in New York city. When I was a student in Berlin, I was asked by Hon. Andrew D. White, then our minister to Germany for the first time, to make a study of the government of the city of Berlin. In order to make my investigations I had occasion to go to the city hall and consult the officials. I found them scholars and gentlemen, thoroughly familiar with all the details of their business and evidently interested in it. I was given a budget of the city of Berlin which was a model. At that time the city council of Berlin was a body of high-minded men, among whom one of the most celebrated scientists of the world occupied a dominant position; I mean Dr. Rudolf Virchow. It was largely through his influence that improved sanitary conditions had been introduced into Berlin, saving the lives of many thousands annually. Soon after my return to this country I had occasion to go to the city hall of New York, and was almost overcome by a sense of humiliation at the contrast, seeing corruptlooking men sitting on desks and chewing tobacco, men evidently not at all versed in the science of municipal government and caring nothing about it. When I was a member of the Maryland Tax Commission, I was astonished to find how little knowledge tax officials had of the nature of the duties in which they were engaged. But the mention of taxation brings to my mind still another picture. There has undoubtedly been an improvement during the past twenty years in this country. I think of the Wisconsin Tax Commission, composed of trained men who are as much interested in their work as are any men with whom I am acquainted in the railway service, and who devote to their duties their best powers. I think also about our state universities described so recently in the columns of Christendom by by President Northrop, where one finds men working just as diligently, just as zealously in the public service, as do those men who are employed in the universities which are private foundations. In the civil service everything depends upon the kind of men who There are placed in control. The whole problem, after all, is largely one of social psychology. If the people come to see that the office exists, not for the officeholder, but for the sake of the people as a whole, and that trained experts are needed in private as well as in public business, and that it is the duty as well as the interest of the people to afford such conditions of service as to attract the most capable men, we shall be on our way to the solution of the problem. These considerations suggest also that one may consistently oppose public ownership at a particular time and place, not because the alternative, public control, is likely to be satisfactory, but because the psychological moment for passing over to public ownership has not arrived. It need scarcely be said that the question which we are considering is not at all a question of socialism, which means the abolition of private ownership in land and capital. The question at present under consideration is not the abolition of private ownership, but the line of demarcation between private and public ownership, and also between private and public business. In conclusion, just a word may be said. about the postal scandals which are attracting so much attention and causing so much anxiety and distress to rightminded Americans. These postal scandals must be considered in their wider connections. The corruption which has been revealed in the postoffice is not something isolated, but it is part of a larger whole. It reveals a wrong view of office as an opportunity for the officeholder instead of an opportunity for social service. It reveals the fact that we have looked upon government too much as merely a business concern, and have overlooked the further fact that it should be an expression of the higher life of the nation. Finally, in considering the pros and cons of public ownership and public control, the careful observer and critical thinker will not fail to notice that we instinctively establish a higher standard for public business than we do for private business. The man who is engaged in a private manufacturing business may interest others in his pecuniary success by methods which would be criminal if he were engaged in the public service. M CHARACTER SKETCHES OF CITIES DENVER BY ELTWEED POMEROY OST cities measure their history In 1820, Major Long, whose name is by centuries; Denver's growth has been compressed into decades. Still lacking five years of half a century, its start was that of hundreds of western mining camps. In 1859 it was a huddled group of prairie schooners, dug-outs, tents and shacks, inhabited by attached to Long's Peak, corroborated Major Pike's report. Even as late as 1868, General Hazen, in an article in The North American Review, said we had reached the western limit of our agricultural resources and predicted nothing but mining interests at Denver and beyond. To-day miners, seven hundred miles from the nearest railway station. So near to-day in time is it that a man of threescore could easily have been the first arrival and have remembered it. But these few decades have been more crowded with events and growth than a cycle of Cathay. Denver has lived, and to-day she has as distinctive a character as her older, in years, eastern sisters. But how and why has this smear of miners' cabins come to be the mountain metropolis? In 1805, Major Pike, from whom Pike's Peak was named, said that the Missouri river would end civilization. Colorado, with its twenty-five thousand miles of irrigating canals-enough to circle the globe-ships grain and the choicest fruits east. Denver is a great manufacturing city whose manufactured products in 1900 were $41,369,000, while the products of the mines of the whole state were only $43,920,000 in 1902. Learn the cause of this growth in direct opposition to the words of the official prophets and you will understand a large part of Denver's character. More than ten years ago Hon. William Orton, ex-president of the Western Union Telegraph Company, on return from a trip west, said: "The four great cities of this continent are to be New York, Chicago, Denver and San Francisco." These four cities are on the same parallel of latitude and a thousand miles apart. In the old world, cities were separated by the distance a horse could travel in a day. In the new world, the great cities are separated by the distance a railway train can go in twenty-four hours, with large secondary cities about twelve hours' ride between. The barren and mountainous country between Denver and San Francisco makes that stretch longer than a day and a night's ride and allows for the growth of a large secondary city in Utah, and Salt Lake City has preempted that place. But swing a circle of a thousand miles radius around Denver and within it is no rival. Denver commands the mountains as Chicago holds the Mississippi valley, as San Francisco dominates the Pacific slope and as New York, while serving the whole country, particularly owns the Atlantic coast. In the neighborhood of Denver, a great city had to be located. The site, the railroads and the enterprise and genius of its first inhabitants definitely fixed it where Denver regally sits. Of the imperial future of their beautiful city, every Denverite is sure, not with the half blatant swagger and brag of Chicago, but with a serene, unquestioned, largely silent faith. Such wonderful growth have they seen that any growth seems natural. So Denver, with but 150,000 population, has all the ideals, manners, methods, atmosphere, corruptions, great activities, spirit and life of a metropolis of a million. It is far more cosmopolitan than Chicago. It is the smallest big city on the continent. Its spirit is really great. "Oh, yes!" rejoins a native; "a thousand in the mountains counts for far more than the same number in your sluggish lowland and coast cities." This is true. The increase by immigration in Denver is so rapid that there are fewer children and old people than in a slower-growing community. You rarely see an old person on the street. This is one factor in the air of vigor about the place. Yet Denver is not a foreign city, but more purely American than its eastern or western neighbors. By the census figures, eighty-one per cent of her population is American born, while New York has but sixty-three per cent, Boston sixtyfive, Chicago sixty-five, San Francisco sixty-six. Of the foreign population but few are German with their phlegmatic temperament and a goodly number are English. In fact, among the English upper classes, Colorado is the best known state in the Union. Here they come to shoot and to invest, and here come the younger sons to grow up with the country. They have given a slight but distinct English tone to the city. But it is mainly the American who has come and drunk the wine of her air and basked in the balm of her sunshine, so that his activities have been redoubled. He has become more active, optimistic, nervous, excitable. The walk of the people on the streets is springy and light, their eyes bright, their manner quick. They pay more attention to dress. It is rare to see an ill-dressed person on the streets, and as stylish costumes may be seen on the women as in New York and far more than in sooty Chicago or St. Louis. In proportion to its size, Denver has finer dry goods stores than its eastern sisters and their stock is of fine quality. The people look prosperous. The streets on a fine afternoon have an air of gayety and good living. The climate has been a great factor in this development of Denver's character. She is a city of the plains, but plains that are nigh a mile (to be exact, 5,270 feet) above sea-level. Fifteen miles away is the base of the Rockies. The air has the wind-washed, ozonized, exhilarating freshness of the prairie atmosphere, united with the thinness, wonderful clarity and purity of high lands. Either quality is obtainable on the prairies or in the mountains, but it is rare to get the two qualities united. It acts like wine, giving buoyancy and sparkle. It fills the lungs so that consumption and lung diseases are unknown. It is estimated that at least a fifth of Denver's population has only one lung; yet they live and work as if normal. Digestive and bowel diseases, which depress the mind, are rare though not so completely absent as lung diseases. But oh, the number of nerve-specialist doctors in the city, and of palmists, clairvoyants, mind-healers and the like. In proportion to the population, I should say Denver was second to Boston in this respect. The air stimulates, air stimulates, people overdo, become nervous, and, breaking down, seek help |