gnize as progress.

Already this century has witnessed the first municipalized
street railways and telephones in American cities; a national
epidemic of street paving and cleaning; the quadrupling of
electric lighting service and the national appropriation of
display lighting; a successful crusade against dirt of all
kinds--smoke, flies, germs,--and the diffusion of constructive
provisions for health like baths, laundries, comfort stations,
milk stations, school nurses and open air schools; fire
prevention; the humanizing of the police and the advent of the
policewomen; the transforming of some municipal courts into
institutions for the prevention of crime and the cure of
offenders; the elaboration of the school curriculum to give
every child a complete education from the kindergarten to the
vocational course in school or university or shop; municipal
reference libraries; the completion of park systems in most
large cities and the acceptance of the principle that the
smallest city without a park and playground is not quite
civilized; the modern playground movement giving organized and
directed play to young and old; the social center; the
democratic art museum; municipal theaters; the commission form
of government; the city manager; home rule for cities; direct
legislation--a greater advance than the whole nineteenth
century compassed.[326]

2. The Problem of Progress

Sociology inherited its conception of progress from the philosophy of
history. That problem seems to have had its origin in the paradox that
progress at retail does not insure progress at wholesale. The progress
of the community as individuals or in specific directions may, for
example, bring about conditions which mean the eventual destruction of
the community as a whole. This is what we mean by saying that
civilizations are born, grow, and decay. We may see the phenomenon in
its simplest form in the plant community, where the very growth of the
community creates a soil in which the community is no longer able to
exist. But the decay and death of one community creates a soil in which
another community will live and grow. This gives us the interesting
phenomenon of what the ecologists call "succession." So individuals
build their homes, communities are formed, and eventually there comes
into existence a great city. But the very existenc