MUNICIPAL STATESMANSHIP.

Auckland Star, Volume XXIX, Issue 21, 26 January 1898, Page 8

MUNICIPAL STATESMANSHIP.

EEMAEKABLE MODERN CHANGES

THE GREAT CITIES.OF.EUROPE.

EXAMPLES WORTHY 1«O BE FOLLOWED IN THE COLONIES. .

Mr John D. Fitzgerald, a prominent member of the IJabour Party in New Soiitli Wales, contributes to the Sydney' 'Daily Telegraph' an interesting article-on the important position occupied by municipal government in Europe. He says: —

'In the last 40 years Europe lias witnessed a change in the sphere ofmunicipal government which amounts almost to a revolution. The whole conformation of large cities has been changed. Magnificent thoroughfares have taken the place of narrow, reeking lanes; decent sanitary dwellings stand upon the ground once occupied by foul and pestilent slums. The death rate has been reduced materially. The ■boundaries of large cities have been subjected to expansions which have brought suburban areas within the pale and influence of the cities, .and have incorporated them with city governments, as nations do territories by conquest or colonisation. London, for example, is aptly called a "Nation City." Its county municipal bounds embrace upwards of six millions of people. In one Continental city, a noble thoroughfare, the finest in Europe, stands oh the place whereon stood, a mediaeval wall, moat, and glacis, removed for that purpose. Within the wide sphere of modern municipalism are included sanitary science, architectural and electrical science, bacteriology, humanitarian cfeire of the poor, and a practical collectivism which owns and successfully manages, in the interests of the whole of the citizens, great gas works, electrical and hydraulic works; which .establishes and manages, in the interest of the citizens, tramways, baths, laundries, model lodging-houses, concert halls, art galleries, libraries, technical colleges, art schools,-model dwellings, for the poor, and great public parks. , 'A brief glance at the municipal activities enumerated above suffices to show that most of these are activities which, if not impossible of management by the State, at any rate are sure of infinitely better management by local authorities. And so experience has proved. Moreover, the movement has called into action a class of men whose ideas and efforts in this sphere have been considered worthy of being honoured with the name of statesmanship.. Mr' Joseph Chamberlain graduated as a practical statesman in the Birmingham -Municipal Council before he entered the higher field of Imperial politics, in which he is to-day the most prominent and com- i manding personality. There are men j who hold the opinion that nothing he has ever done in Imperial affairs has been half so valuable to England, and to the world, as the work done by him . while Mayor of Birmingham. His efforts during his occupancy of the Mayoralty have made Birmingham one of the best governed cities iv Europe, '■

improved and beautified beyond all conception; and have furnished an inspiration and set a mode! tor innumerable other great cities. Lord Rosebery went from the Foreign Secretaryship of a great empire to the chairmanship of The first London County Council, and from this position lie stepped into that of Premier of England. Mr John Burns was transformed in the London Comity Cor.ncil from a wild, revolutionary demagogue to a practical statesman, whose tine oratorical and administrative gifts are now directed towards the attainment Of useful measures. .Municipal statesmanship attracted to its ranks in London philosophers like Mr Frederick Harrison, scientists like Sir John Lubbock, able publicists like Mr Sydney Webb, and financial a tithe .Ties like Lord Lhi gen and Sir Thomas Earrer. In Berlin the celebrated Professor Yirchow, physician, scientist, ethrologist, and archaeologist, is a prominent member of the Municipal Council, hi Vienna the Emperor Franz-Josef himself took a prominent part in the movement which gave the Riugstrasse ' —the finest thoroughfare in Europe — to the city, a movement which, in its later developments, has brought Vienna into coinpet'tion with Paris and Berlin for pride of place as the first city of Continental Europe, in short, in all countries —and nowhere more than in England—municipal life is attracting the ablest men from all professions and business pursuits, as well as men of culture, leisure, and fortune.

The great material changes brought about in city life by the action of this new development are mainly remarkable for their impartiality. If the rich have gained in ah increase of the pleasures and refinements of life, the poor also have reaped a harvest in its necessaries. The dangers anil risks of city life have been minimised, the death rate reduced (a benefit to poor and rich alike), and in all respects •concerning food, shelter, and education the amelioration of the condition of the poor has been beyond calculation. All the increases of open city spaces, of parks, have made for the social benefit and physical improvement of the poor. The rich formerly had their private parks; the poor now have public parks. But the rich avail themselves also of the advantages given freely to all, and they gain by the use of the public cycling' and driving tracks constructed by municipal bodies for general convenience. The extended use of public parks has broadened out, the narrow exclusiveness of class. On Battersea Park, London, you may see Karl Jersey and Lord Onslow "biking" in the early morning on the splendid track provided by the London County Council, in the same park you will find John Burns and his constituents playing cricket on' the green in summer,'and skating in winter on the ponds and lakes. Costly carriages, with powdered menials, jostle costermongers' carts in the. fine drives. Artists from the studios of Chelsea, over the other side of the Thames, litterateurs from the same quarters, mingle with mechanics from the Shaftesbury model dwellings, or from the terraces of Battersea and Clapham. in the Bois do Bolonge, Paris, the crowd is nearly as promiscuous and impartial. In the great Prater Park, Vienna, you will sec the carriage and fast American trotters of an Esterhazy pull out for the bicycle of a draper's clerk. As the slum areas are demolished, and healthy and sanitary dwellings are provided municipally" for the. poorer workmen, the rich obtain greater immunity from those infectious diseases for which insanitary areas were responsible. ".Dossers' dwellings" -provide shelter iri great cities like' London, Aberdeen, Glasgow, H uddersfield, for the outcasts, who once stood, like accusing angels, at the carriage doors of wealth as it went from one great society function to another. Human beings who slept on the scats of the Thames Embankment Gardens, huddled together, with the snow falling on them, or abject wretches who stamped the night away, in public urinals, to escape the awful cold outside, as I saw them doing in the winter of ISOO-91,. now retire-to the friendly roof of the municipal shelter houses, where, for a very small sum of money, they obtain food, shelter, and, not least, baths. This is an example of those developments in humanitarian municipal ism which, administered by shrewd business men and practical men of affairs, not by dreamers and enthusiasts, are made to act as selfsupporting' institutions. .By such a policy as this, at one stroke municipal statesmanship has taken the keenest pangs and sufferings of poverty away, without adding to the burdens of the taxpayers, and has removed from the ken of those of the rich, whose sympathies were, aroused, the eyesore of the awful city poverty and squalor which seemed' formerly to be beyond remedy.'