with a report demonstrating (if figures won't lie) that the effect of labor-saving machinery on labor has been to reduce the cost of the articles manufactured, and at the same time largely to increase the wages of and the demand for labor. I'm a good deal of an optimist myself, and willing to believe that these things are thus-at any rate we ought to have prosperity and increasing demand for labor at increasing wages under an advancing civilization-if other things were equal -if we were consistent-if, and if, and if—. Perhaps it will help us to turn "ought to be" into "is" if we contrast the golden visions of the president and the commissioner with certain facts as they are. Just now we note lasters in Massachusetts and coal miners in Illinois striking for living wages; laborers from Indiana so poor and desperate that they are willing to take the places of the Illinois strikers; thousands of unemployed in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and even Denver, willing to "do anything" to earn bread and butter, but unable to get anything to do. Here in Boston at the last annual meeting of the Industrial Aid Society for the Prevention of Pauperism the general agent, Henry Peterson, reported that "there has been a decrease of 172 in the number of employers applying at the office for help. The whole number of men and women who applied for work was 4,045, and the number for whom work has been secured is 3,474. A larger number of women have obtained work through the society this year than last. The depression of business during the entire year was noticeable in the men's department. Manufacturers of all kinds have curtailed expenses, and much less than the normal number of men was employed on public works." More people seeking work and less work for them than last year; more women forced into the ranks of the bread winners and more men forced out,-right here in the Hub of the Universe, where, so far as my observation and experience go, business appears to be brisker and the population more actively engaged than in any other city in the country. Let us begin by being honest and facing things as they are, if— Democrats or Republicans-we mean to make things better.

THE ARENA

VOL. XX. NOVEMBER-DECEMBER, 1898. No. 5.

MUNICIPAL SOCIALISM IN BOSTON.

BY FRANCIS J. DOUGLAS.

B

OSTON is one of the oldest muncipalities in America and is commonly regarded as the most conservative, and in many aspects the most intellectual. Its present mayor, Josiah Quincy, is a scion of one of the oldest, and in many aspects one of the most conservative and intellectual, of Boston families. He is the third Josiah Quincy who has held the chief office of the city. His great-grandfather was the second mayor, his grandfather the eleventh, and he is the thirty-fourth. The Quincys have been conspicuous in the life of Boston for more than two and a half centuries. No family in the history of Boston, with a single exception, represents so much of unbroken genealogical distinction as the house of Quincy. This exception is the family of Adams, with which the name and the fortunes of the Quincys long were mingled. In the earlier days the women of the Quincy family were famous belles, and the men have reflected all the shining culture of the most cultivated environment in America. "Dorothy Q.," the subject of one of the most familiar poems of Oliver Wendell Holmes, was a Quincy with whom the present mayor can claim a common ancestry. She was an early daughter of the house of which he is the latest son.

The Quincys once were wealthy as well as aristocratic, and owned a large estate in the town of Quincy, which had been the family seat for many generations. But for many years they have not been rich; the ancestral acres are no longer in the family, and Mayor Quincy, who is a bachelor, now lives with his father's family in an old-fashioned house on what has ceased to be even the edge of the fashionable quarter of the city of Boston.

The first Josiah Quincy who was Mayor of Boston transmitted to his son and his great-grandson certain physical and mental traits which may be regarded as family characteristics. The Quincys have been tall and dark, of notable gravity of demeanor and much apparent reserve and abstraction. They have been distinguished for their intense public spirit and energy, for their learning and eloquence, and for a certain striking originality, ingenuity, and audacity of intellect, which is the most obvious and interesting distinction of the present mayor. The first Mayor Quincy lived to be ninety-two years old, and his public career was marked by a frank and vigorous contempt for those conventionalities which hamper progress. The second Mayor Quincy lived to be over eighty, and he exhibited all the activity and public spirit of his father. The present Mayor Quincy is in his fortieth year. It is easy to trace Josiah Quincy's inheritance of traits from both ancestors: from his great-grandfather the love of letters and the appreciation of the æsthetic, from his grandfather practical public zeal, and from both the limitless energy, the originality of thought, grace of expression, and cool determination with which he plots and plans and-performs. There never has been a mayor who had greater incentive to cultivate his powers and let his light shine before men. In the courtyard of the City Hall, under the window by which he sits at work in the mayor's office, he may look down on the handsome bronze statue of his great-grandfather, on which is lettered the story of the first Mayor Quincy's public service. The Mayor passes this statue whenever he enters or leaves the City Hall. That he is not unmindful of the