ry. It is only our most permanent intellectual
impulse, that of seeking for unity, which excuses the cheap unitary
explanations so often current; as, for instance, that social evils are
mainly to be explained by intemperance, as for one school of reformers;
by poverty or luxury, for a second and third; by Tammany or other form
of party government, by socialism or by individualism for yet others;
that they are due to dissent or to church, to ignorance or to the spread
of science, and so on almost indefinitely--doubtless not without
elements of truth in each!

Yet let me offer as yet another explanation of civic evils, this more
general one--distinguished from the preceding by including them all and
more--that not only is our "Town" in itself imperfect, but the other
three elements we have been characterising as school, cloister and city,
are yet more imperfect, since disordered, decayed, or undeveloped anew.
It is because of each and all of these imperfect realisations of our
civic life, that the evils of life sink down, or flame out, into these
complex eruptions of social evils with which our human aggregations are
as yet cursed.

Hence, to those who are struggling with disease and pain, with ignorance
and defect, with vice, and with crime, but for the most part too
separately, it is time to say that all these four evils are capable of
being viewed together, and largely even treated together. They are not
unrelated, but correspond each as the negative to that fourfold
presentment of ideals we have hitherto been raising. To this ideal unity
of healthy town, with its practical and scientific schools of all kinds,
with its meditative cloister of ethical and social idealism, of unified
science and philosophy, of imagination and drama, all culminating in
the polity, culture, and art which make a city proper, we have here the
corresponding defects in detail.

The evils of existing city life are thus largely reinterpreted; and if
so more efficiently combated; since the poverty, squalor and ugliness of
our cities, their disease and their intemperance, their ignorance,
dulness and mental defect, their vice and crime are thus capable not
only of separate treatment but of an increasingly unified civic hygiene,
and this in the widest sense, material and moral, economic and idealist,
utilitarian and artistic. Even the most earnest and capable workers
towards civic betterment in these many fields may gain at once in hope
and in ef