it, in presence of the enemy, they were heartily sick of it, and were glad to resign. It seems to me, that as long as we govern cities in that way, we shall have bad horse-cars, bad tenementhouses, bad streets, bad theatres, bad liquor-shops, and a great many other bad things, which, in a city where administration was a science, and no man chosen to office until he had been trained to it; Colonel Ingham did not find in Sybaris. I observe that the newspapers are a good deal exercised when a committee of the city government, or when any city officers, go to study the systems of some other cities. For my part, I wish they went a great deal oftener than they do, and studied such systems a great deal more. I believe the city of Boston could make no wiser expenditure than it would make in sending to Europe, once in five years, an intelligent officer from each great department to study French, English, German, Italian, and Russian administration of streets; of hackney-coaches, omnibuses, and railroad stations; of prisons, of the detective and general police; of health; of markets, and of education. There is hardly a large city in the civilized world which has not some hints of value which it could give to every other city. Colonel Ingham has received many protests against the arbitrary and unprincipled action of the government of Sybaris in compelling marriage among its people. He had already made his own protest, as he could, in his journal. Nor would he wish to be understood as desiring to enforce anywhere statutes so tyrannical. But, as I understand him, he is convinced, by what he has seen in Sybaris and in the rest of the world, that every artificial obstacle to marriage is so much multiplication of all other evil in the world, and whether that obstacle come in the form of fashion, of custom, of sentiment, of gossip, of political economy, or of law, it is to be deprecated and set aside. I may add that I do not know why such views have not a larger place than they have in the current discussions of female suffrage. The married woman and the married man being one, she now has suffrage. How would it answer to withdraw suffrage from the unmarried men? This would put them on an equality with the unmarried women; and there would be a possibility, if they are troubled by the loss, of their regaining the privilege. But I will not, in a preface, discuss the details of any of the experiments in city administration here suggested. My chief wish is accomplished, if I can call attention to the delicacy and difficulty of these questions, and to the necessity of studying them with scientific and conscientious precision. When our best men study the details of local administration with the care with which Themistocles, Aristides, and Pericles studied them in Athens, with which Metellus, the Catos, Pompey the Great, and Julius Cæsar were willing to study them in Rome, we shall find, as I believe, no difficulty in the republican government of cities. The shorter essays in this book are devoted to the single subject of the homes of laborers at work in large cities, and, as I trust, require no further explanation. As the last sheets of this book leave my hands, the watchful kindness of a friend enables me to add the last word regarding Sybaris. Under the title "De Paris a Sybaris," (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1868,) M. Léon Palustre de Montifaut publishes his studies of art and literature in Rome and Southern Italy. And here is his record of what he saw of Sybaris. He speaks first of Cassano, the last Italian town which looks down upon the valley of ancient Sybaris. "Cassano, with its beautiful gardens, its tranquil aspect, and its gray mountains, reminds one of the ancient Sichem. It has its freshness and its poetry, if it has not the same reminiscences. "Still, I hastened my departure, for I was eager to cross before night those broad and marshy expanses over which the eye travelled without an obstacle, — a vast semicircle cut into the thickness of the Apennine, or fertile intervals left by the sea. “And what was I going to see? Not so much as a ruin, an uncertain region over which lay loose the voluptuous name of Sybaris. And I had made a long journey. I had undergone incredible fatigue to give myself this empty satisfaction. How the inhabitants of this easy city would have laughed at me! They could not understand, says Athenæus, why one should quit his country. For themselves they gloried in growing old where they first saw the light. Yet this people practised the broadest hospitality, and, contrary to the policy of most of the Greek states, they readily admitted the colonists of other nations to the rank of citizens. May not this liberal spirit and the astonishing fertility of the soil explain the prosperity of this prosperous town, which is so strangely kept in obscurity by all antiquity? Varro tells us that wheat produced a hundred-fold on the whole territory of Sybaris. At the present time the uplands produce the richest harvests." And this, I am sorry to say, is the only contribution to the history or topography of Sybaris made since the date of Mr. Ingham's voyage. Mons. Montifaut, alas like all the others! hurried across the upland six miles back from the sea. It is as if a traveller from Providence, coming up to Readville, should cross to Watertown and Waltham, and then, going through the Notch of the White Mountains to Montreal, should publish his observations on Boston. And these notes, alas, as late as 1867, are dated like Colonel Ingham's, on the 1st of April ! |