[1] Consider the commission form of city government and the municipal
manager plan.

{429}

CHAPTER XXVII

INDUSTRIAL PROGRESS

_Industries Radiate from the Land as a Centre_.--In primitive
civilizations industry was more or less incidental to life. The food
quest, protection of the body from storm and sun by improvised
habitation and the use of skins, furs, bark, and rushes for clothing,
together with the idea of human association for the perpetuation of the
species, are the fundamental notions regarding life. Under such
conditions industry was fitful and uncertain. Hunting for vegetable
products and for animals to sustain life, the protection of the life of
individuals from the elements and, incidentally, from the predatory
activities of human beings, were the objectives of primitive man.

As the land is the primary source of all economic life, systematic
industry has always begun in its control and cultivation. Not until
man settled more or less permanently with the idea of getting his
sustenance from the soil did industrial activities become prominent.
In the development of civilization one must recognize the ever-present
fact that the method of treatment of the land is a determining factor
in its fundamental characteristics, for it must needs be always that
the products that we utilize come from the action of man on nature and
its reaction on him. While the land is the primary source of wealth,
and its cultivation a primal industry, it does not include the whole
category of industrial enterprises, for tools must be made, art
developed, implements provided, and machinery constructed. Likewise,
clothing and ornaments were manufactured, and habitations constructed,
and eventually transportation begun to carry people and goods from one
place to another. These all together make an enlarged group of
activities, all radiating from the soil as a common centre.

{430}

We have already referred to the cultivation of the valleys of the
Euphrates and the Nile by systems of irrigation and the tilling of the
soil in the valleys of Greece in the crude and semibarbarous methods
introduced by the barbarians from the north. We have referred to the
fact that the Romans were the first to develop systematic agriculture,
and even the Teutonic people, the invaders of Rome, were rude
cultivators of the soil.

Social organization is dependent to a large extent upon the method of
attachment to the soil--whether peop