In the matter of public charities, also, we are not timid as to extending the function of the government. We build enormous city hospitals and almhouses; we care with tenderness for the defective and the dependent; but for that great mass of people just beyond the line, from whom they are constantly recruited, we do practically nothing. It has been said that if a workingman in New York falls a victim to pneumonia, he is taken to a hospital and given skilled treatment; if it leaves him tubercular the city will have a care over him, and valiantly will stand by, putting him into a public sanatorium, providing him with nutritious food and fresh air until his recovery. But if he is turned away from the hospital without tuberculosis, merely too depleted and wretched to go back to his regular employment, then the city can do nothing for him unless he be ready to call himself an out-and-out pauper. We are afraid of the notion of governmental function which would minister to the primitive needs of the mass of the people, although we are quite ready to care for him whom misfortune or disease has made the exception. It is really the rank and file, the average citizen, who is ignored by the government, while he works out his real problems through other agencies, although he is scolded for staying at home on election day, and for refusing to be interested in issues which really do not concern him. It is comparatively easy to understand the punitive point of view which seeks to suppress, or the philanthropic which seeks to palliate; but it is much more difficult to formulate that city government which is adapted to our present normal living. As over against the survivals of the first two, excellent and necessary as they are, we have but the few public parks and baths, the few band concerts and recreation piers--always excepting, of course, the public schools and the social activities slowly centering around them; for public education has long been a passion in America, and we seem to have been willing to make that an exception to our general theory of government.