Science and Citizenship
citizen found himself able to initiate a cycle of transmutations, and to carry it on up to a certain point, after which it appeared that the cycle completed itself automatically. This sort of scientific magic transformed coal into power to make cheap goods for the consumption of cheap labourers, and the cheap labour then applied itself to coal to produce more power to make more cheap goods for the consumption of still cheaper labourers, and so on indefinitely. This ever-extending series of transformations evidently reaches its culmination in the growth of an ideal city like East London, which so magnificently surpasses all other cities in its accumulated reservoir of cheap labour. Such are the ideals of civic policy which tend to work themselves out in fact and history, if not in word and theory, when city development gets arrested at the stage of Town.
Unfair as it would be to English, not less would it be to American civilisation as a whole, to impute to it the conception of civic status restricted to the limitations of the railway engineer or even of the Chamber of Commerce. The United States is not only the country of railway cities and railway kings, it is also the country par excellence, of schools, universities, and educationists. The American "School-ma'rm" balances the American Viking, and the world trembles in the hope and expectation that some day she may succeed in