to
be conserved; the city, therefore, has governmental, educational, and
recreational functions as a social organization, and within its limits
all kinds of human concerns find their sponsors and supporters.
Unquestionably, the economic interests are preponderant. On the
principle that social structure corresponds to function, the structure
of the city lends itself to the performance of the economic function.
Business streets are the principal thoroughfares. Districts near the
great factories are crowded with the tenements that shelter the
workers. Little room is left for breathing-places in town, and little
leisure in which to breathe. Government is usually in the hands of
professional politicians who are too willing to take their orders from
the cohort captains of business. Morals, aesthetics, and recreation are
all subordinate to business. Even religion is mainly an affair of
Sunday, and appears to be of relatively small consequence compared
with business or recreation. The great problems of the city are
consequently economic at bottom. Poverty and misery, drunkenness,
unemployment, and crime are all traceable in part, at least, to
economic deficiency. Economic readjustments constitute the crying need
of the twentieth-century city.

187. =The Manufacturing Industry.=--It is the function of the
agriculturist and the herdsman, the miner and the lumberman, to
produce the raw material. The sailor and the train-hand, the
longshoreman and the teamster, transport them to the industrial
centres. It is the business of the manufacturer and his employees to
turn them into the finished product for the use of society.
Manufacturing is the leading occupation in thousands of busy towns and
small cities of all the industrial nations of western Europe and
America, and shares with commerce and trade as a leading enterprise in
the cosmopolitan centres. The merchant or financier who thinks his
type of emporium or exchange is the only municipal centre of
consequence, needs only to mount to the top of a tall building or
climb a suburban hill where he can look off over the city and see the
many smoking chimneys, to realize the importance of the factory. With
thousands of tenement-house dwellers it is as natural to fall into the
occupation of a factory hand as in the rural regions for the youth to
become a farmer. The growing child who leaves school to help support
the family has never learned a craftsman's trade, but he may find a
subord