Local interest

“ Here men would meet—men drawn from every class—and could voice their complaints, their difficulties, their desire for improved conditions of work. Only in this way could local government become really a help to its neighbourhood. ”

“ Thus, persons who are financially independent--such as individual businessmen, estate owners, successful farmers, artisans and all those who exercise local leadership or have local prestige, such as popular local clergymen or political figures, are anathema. ”

“ These local government areas of to-day represent for the most part what were once distinct, distinctly organised, and individualised communities, complete minor economic systems, and they preserve a tradition of what was once administrative convenience and economy. To-day, I submit, they do not represent communities at all, and they become more wasteful and more inconvenient with every fresh change in economic necessity. ”

“ Government, whatever its form, is an intricate and expensive machine, and therefore sure and ample sources of revenue are as necessary to it as blood is to the human body. The necessary expenses of a local community, such as a village, a city, or a county, are heavy; while those of a State are immense, and those of a nation almost beyond conception. ”

“ But, in fact, the whole people of the State are deeply interested in this subject. The burdens borne by the cities and towns must be shared, in part at least, by all who transact business with them. The town and the neighboring country have a common interest, and, in many respects must be regarded as one community. ”

“ Their political institutions were the logical outcome of their laws respecting landed property, which favored a great subdivision of the land and great equality among the people, thus promoting prosperous cultivation, compact communities, general education, a healthy public opinion, democracy in managing the affairs of the church, and that system of local self government which has since prevailed over so many States. ”

“ The Local Bodies have had no spontaneous evolution; they are the creation of the Central Government, they are supported and controlled by it, and look to it for assistance whenever they are in financial difficulties. ”

“ The men who have invested their capital in these enterprises, the farmers who have felt the benefit of their neighborhood, and the men who work in shop or field will not fail to find and to defend a community of interest. ”

“ In fine, the substantial improvement, and even the embellishment of towns, is a work which both the central and local governing bodies in a country should keep a steady hand upon. It especially concerns them. What are they there for but to do that which individuals cannot do? It concerns them, too, as it tells upon the health, morals, education, and refined pleasures of the people they govern. In doing it, they should avoid pedantry, parsimony, and favouritism; and their mode of action should be large, considerate, and foreseeing. ”

“ Everywhere there is a variety in local sentiment, action, and development. Sit down in the seats of the State governments and study the methods of treatment of essentially the common institutions of government, of charity and discipline, and you will be impressed with the variety of local spirit and performance in the Union. ”

“ The popular will is expressed in two ways, which are quite distinct and relate to different provinces: First, collectively, by majority, in regard to blended, mutually involved interests, such as the large economic and political concerns of the community ”

“ It is essential to democracy that any group of citizens whose interests or desires separate them at all widely from the rest of the community should be free to decide their internal affairs for themselves. And what is true of national or local groups is equally true of economic groups, such as miners or railway men. ”

“ One of the most difficult and interesting practical problems which now engages the thoughts of the American people is how to maintain economy, efficiency, and purity in the administration of local affairs, and especially in the government of towns and cities, without a departure from principles and methods which are deemed essential to free popular government. ”

“ In a country with a great expanse of territory, with peoples of widely differing customs and ideas, local self government in local matters is essential to the peace and happiness of the people in the several communities as well as to the strength and unity of the country as a whole. ”

“ That which had been one widely scattered and loosely connected people had become divided into many distinct communities, each with its own government, its separate historical traditions, its local prides and local antagonisms, its more or less definite and sharp-cut national consciousness. ”

“ The management of purely local business by the localities, and of the great enterprises of industry by the union of those who voluntarily supply the pecuniary means, is further recommended by all the advantages which have been set forth in this Essay as belonging to individuality of development, and diversity of modes of action. Government operations tend to be everywhere alike. With individuals and voluntary associations, on the contrary, there are varied experiments, and endless diversity of experience. ”

“ Would you, with a falconer’s voice, lure your faithless tassels back again?{33} Apply to the practical remedy of your wrongs; proceed to the reform of your domestic government, and turn your thoughts to that art which, coming into action every day in the year during the longest life, includes within its circles the whole philosophy of economy and order, the preservation of good health, and the tone of good society—and all peculiarly within your province. ”

“ It is the Community, organized in various ways, which maintains government and foreign relations, secures law and order, fosters the arts and inventions, aids education, breeds opinion, and promotes, through concession or otherwise, the agencies of transportation, communication, credit, banking, and the like, without which any production, save the most primitive, would be impossible. It is the Community which creates the demand for commodities and services, through which Labor is provided with remunerative employment, and Capital with a return upon its investment. ”

“ But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims, and in a greater degree than any other, at the highest good. ”

“ What would societies, what would nations be, unless the members and citizens composing them had homes,—had each his dear and private home,—where are garnered up and cherished all the good affections, pure thoughts, and innocent delights, out of which, as from his storehouse, he brings his contribution of friendly regard, benevolent feeling, and true principle, to increase the common stock? As the private home is, such will be the public society, such will be the character of the nation itself. And what is the basis and the soul of home, but the pure conjugal bond and union? ”

“ The local authorities, equally innocent of studied economic views, deny that there is any misery; send leaders of deputations to the Local Government Board, who promptly send them back to the guardians ”

“ In earlier days, before industry and commerce developed so greatly, local functions were the more numerous; but as population grows the whole country tends to become one great community, hence many functions formerly performed by the local authorities are being taken over by the states and the nation. It is impossible to lay down any rule as to what functions are local and what functions are general. ”

“ They have power, the people have, and they have needs, great common needs; and they have great common wealth. All your fat, rich franchises, all your great social values, the values added to land and franchise by the presence of the great, common, numerous mass, all the city’s public property—all are theirs, their common property. They own enough in common to meet all their great common needs, and they have an organization to keep for them and to develop for their use and profit all these great needed social values. ”

“ Selecting as a [229] representative of the "best people" of America, any citizen eminent in his particular community—capitalist, landed proprietor or "real-estate owner," banker, manufacturer, lawyer, railway president, or what not,—that man as a usual thing takes a very active interest in politics, and not in the politics of the nation only, but of his State and his municipality. ”

“ Your industries and products are so varied that working together, supplying the wants of different communities by the productions of each, it must be that you shall grow in population, and that the rewards of your labor shall be full and rich. But above all these material things in which you show the country the resources of your people, I rejoice that social order, education, good morals, and all those things that tend to promote the human happiness, the peace of your communities, and the glory of your State, are also here thought of and promoted. ”

“ At length, we find in this expanded and solidly-organized social body provinces, communes, churches, hospitals, schools, corporate bodies and associations of every species and dimension, temporary or permanent, voluntary or involuntary, in brief, a multitude of social engines constructed out of human beings who, on account of personal interest, habit, and constraint, or through inclination, conscience, and generosity, co-operate according to a public or tacit statute in effecting in the material or spiritual order of things this or that determinate undertaking. ”

“ Each Common interest was in turn forthwith removed from society, set up against it as a higher Collective interest, wrested from the individual activity of the members of society, and turned into a subject for governmental administration, from the bridges, the school house and the communal property of a village community, up to the railroads, the national wealth and the national University of France. ”

“ They may, like the citizens of an ancient community, or those of an Asiatic village, have had considerable practice in exercising their faculties on village or town interests, and have even realized a tolerably effective popular government on that restricted scale, and may yet have but slender sympathies with any thing beyond, and no habit or capacity of dealing with interests common to many such communities. ”

“ I purpose, in the few minutes allotted to me, to discover, if possible, the true sphere of the state in reference to the education of the young. I shall use the word state in its broadest sense—a community of persons living within a limited territory and bound together by political ties. If such a community has a right to exist, then it has a right to do anything that is necessary to maintain that existence—to appropriate private property and even to take life itself. ”

“ There is neither trade, nor manufactures, nor business on any extended scale, nor movement of ideas, nor political life, nor any of those powerful bonds which, in well-governed countries, link the provincial towns to the capital, as the members to the heart. ”

“ From looking at the life of fixed communities or localities, the next step is to consider them in their relation to what we might call certain ‘institutions’ of our national life, growth, or conditions. ”

“ The duty of the provinces is, to send yearly subsidies to the capital; that of the Government is, to send rapacious satraps to enrich themselves by the spoils of the people, and to stifle their complaints. ”

“ But I would like to suggest to you that every political community and neighborhood has a character of its own, a moral character, as well as every man and every woman, and it is exceedingly important, looked at even from the side of material advantage, that our communities should maintain a good reputation for social order, intelligence, virtue, and a faithful and willing obedience to law. ”

“ In the midst of this busy life—a life where the citizens themselves watched over their boundaries, defended their territory, kept peace in their borders, took charge of the common property, governed the spending of the town treasure, laboured with their own hands at all public works, ordered their own amusements, the mediæval burgher had his training. ”

“ The state expresses the cooperative or mutual-veto will of that part of society which is politically organized for this purpose. Private property expresses the individual will of the several private owners, or of the private chief, whether patriarch, pope, suzerain, boss, or industrial monopolist, who is at the head of the particular institution. The sociological view, being strictly inductive, does not impart to the theory of the state that which is potential and ideal, but only that which is actual and historical. ”

“ Let every one read, listen, think, reform his own ideas of affairs in his own locality; let him be less interested in the continual wars of national politics than in the interests of his own town and county and state ”

“ The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their law; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. ”

“ The interest each one of us has as a member of a city or a nation in seeing our fellow-citizens healthy, peaceful, and happy is a greater interest, if it be measured in terms of our own real enjoyment of life, than is that interest, of which we so constantly are reminded, which we have in making the State either wealthy by the development of trade, or formidable to foreign countries by its armaments. ”

“ Persons coming from the quarter of the State in which the public land was situated, united in sympathy and interest, constituted always a body who acted together, to promote their common object, either by donations to settlers, or reduction in the price of the public lands, or the relief of those who are debtors for the public domain ”