[Sidenote: Want of practical foresight.] This rapidity of growth has entailed some important consequences. In the first place it obliges the city to make great outlays of money in order to get immediate results. Public works must be undertaken with a view to quickness rather than thoroughness. Pavements, sewers, and reservoirs of some sort must be had at once, even if inadequately planned and imperfectly constructed; and so, before a great while, the work must be done over again. Such conditions of imperative haste increase the temptations to dishonesty as well as the liability to errors of judgment on the part of the men who administer the public funds.[10] Then the rapid growth of a city, especially of a new city, requiring the immediate construction of a certain amount of public works, almost necessitates the borrowing of money, and debt means heavy taxes. It is like the case of a young man who, in order to secure a home for his quickly growing family, buys a house under a heavy mortgage. Twice a year there comes in a great bill for interest, and in order to meet it he must economize in his table or now and then deny himself a new suit of clothes. So if a city has to tax heavily to pay its debts, it must cut down its current expenses somewhere, and the results are sure to be visible in more or less untidiness and inefficiency. Mr. Low tells us that "very few of our American cities have yet paid in full the cost of their original water-works." Lastly, much wastefulness results from want of foresight. It is not easy to predict how a city will grow, or the nature of its needs a few years hence. Moreover, even when it is easy enough to predict a result, it is not easy to secure practical foresight on the part of a city council elected for the current year. Its members are afraid of making taxes too heavy this year, and considerations of ten years hence are apt to be dismissed as "visionary." It is always hard for us to realize how terribly soon ten years hence will be here. The habit of doing things by halves has been often commented on (and, perhaps, even more by our own writers than by foreigners) as especially noticeable in America. It has doubtless been fostered by the conditions which in so many cases have made it absolutely necessary to adopt temporary makeshifts. These conditions have produced a certain habit of mind. [Footnote 10: This and some of the following considerations have been ably set forth and illustrated by Hon. Seth Low, president of Columbia College, and lately mayor of Brooklyn, in an address at Johns Hopkins University, published in _J. H. U. Studies, Supplementary Notes_, no. 4.]