MR. CHAMBERLAIN AND ENGLISH PROVINCIAL LIFE.
THE nation owes a deep debt of gratitude to Mr. Chamberlain for the persistent energy and loyalty with which he has maintained his connection with the City of Birmingham. By doing so he has set an example which was greatly needed to be set in English provincial life. A generation ago the first thing which was done by a citizen of a great commercial town who throve and grew famous in the commercial or political world was to cut off all con- nection with his own town. The great county magnate remained true to his county, and, to whatever office he attained, was always proud to keep up his county connection, to join in his county's public life, and to represent its interests. The town magnate's way of. showing himself a magnate was to cut his connection with the town, to go into the country, and to become a county as opposed to a town grandee. We do not for a moment mean to say that the town magnate who had risen to wealth by commerce and to power by getting office, always or generally did this in an offensive way, and let it be known that he considered he had risen out of a lower into a higher sphere. In most cases he remained on excellent terms with his old town home, and was very likely extremely proud, in theory, of being a Manchester or a Liverpool or a Leeds man, as the case might be, but he tended to "drop away," to find, his interests outside the town, and to bring his children up to regard themselves as belonging to this or that county rather than to the old town. This attitude was not resented by his former fellow-townsmen, but was regarded by them as natural and reasonable. When a man had become great he was considered too big for the town, and even if he took part in the town life it was, as it were, from outside as a county magnate and. not as a citizen.
Mr. Chamberlain has by precept and example always fought against this attitude towards town life, and we are glad. to think that he has found many followers throughout the country. The thorough and stimulating way in which Mr. Chamberlain has identified himself with the life and growth of his own city was most strikingly exemplified in Birmingham last Saturday, when Mr. Chamberlain, dressed in the robes of the Chancellor, walked and sat in state with the Senate and professors and officers of the Birmingham University at the first public conferring of degrees. That ceremony may, in a sense, be said to be the culmination of Mr. Chamberlain's ideal of city development. He began his public life with an intense desire to create and develop a. feeling of local and civic patriotism in the people of Bir- mingham, and when he had himself passed out of the local political arena into that of Imperial politics he still kept before him the duty of inspiring and maintaining a keen and vigorous municipal life. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that forty years ago the idea of civic life in the true sense was almost non-existent in England. People looked upon a town like Birmingham as merely a very thickly inhabited section of the country which required an efficient administrative and rate-collecting body to do the common work of the inhabitants. The notion that anything more was required than good paving and lighting, good sanitation, and sound finance was hardly discoverable. Mr. Chamberlain and the men who worked with him — for he, of course, only gave a specially vigorous and characteristic expression to an impulse which stirred many minds as well as his own—had a very different view of what a city should be. Without doing any- thing that could weaken the wider patriotism, he insisted that the inhabitants of a city should be intensely loyal to, and proud of, their own city, and that they should, in fact, regard it with the affection and pride with which the Greeks in classical times and the Italians in the Middle Ages regarded their cities. This true municipal spirit was to bear fruit by making the city, as it were, self-con- tained and largely independent of outside influences. The city must not only be in a position to satisfy its own material needs and govern itself well, but it must supply stately public institutions and encourage a dignified public life. It must not be necessary for the inhabitants to go to London if they wanted to see the treasures of art and science or to consult learned books. There must be picture galleries, museums, and libraries on the spot to gratify these tastes. In education, again, the town must be self- sufficing. There must be not only primary schools in order to comply with the law, but higher education must be supplied by a public school which should be actively in touch with the city and its life,—not merely seated. in its midst, in it but not of it. Lastly, the city must have its own University, which, though specially regardful of the industries of the town, must be at the same time a true University,—a place where knowledge of all kinds is taught and tested, and where true learning in all its branches is encouraged. With the ceremony of Saturday this ideal of municipal life may be said, we will not say to have been completed, for nothing which is growing can be called complete, but crowned. Birmingham has, in fact, shown the true civic patriotism in the best possible way. In its active administration, its splendid public buildings, its museums and galleries, its Grammar School, and now in its own University, it has given outward and visible expression to that spirit.
Finally, Mr. Chamberlain, though a Cabinet Minister and one of the foremost statesmen of his time, has, as we have noted. above, set an example which shows that a man, to whatever heights he may rise, can never rise so high as to be above taking a personal interest and share in the life of the town to which he belongs. He has proved that a man may remain a patriotic townsman even though his mind is occupied with the most moment- ous of national and Imperial concerns, and. that high office in truth offers no excuse for cutting oneself off from municipal life. It is our fervent wish that in future men who occupy positions and have careers similsx to that of Mr. Chamberlain will imitate his loyalty to his town. If they do we shall find, the great problem of the future i.e., how to keep a vast urban popu- lation from degenerating morally and physically—easier of solution. If the great men of our towns were to con- tinue to live in or near their towns, and to share the social life of those towns, it would be far harder for physical con- ditions inimical to the health and happiness of the towns- people to grow up. The poor are too dumb and too indifferent, and the majority of the middle class are too fiercely busy to trouble much about the conditions under which they live. Hence, in and around our cities we see the air, the land, and the water contaminated and befouled by carelessness and waste. If it were the custom for the men who have thriven most in our great cities to remain in them, we may be sure that a great deal more would be done to prevent the wilful and wasteful pollution of our cities. As it is, however, the men who could most easily and effectively protest against the evil physical conditions of our city life, and who have the power and leisure to do so, withdraw from the cities into the country. If they remained towns- men, as Mr. Chamberlain has, and as men under similar conditions do in France and Belgium and Holland, we may be sure that we should soon see our cities fitter places in which to breed up a healthy race than they are now. We should have less smoke in the air, less refuse in the rivers, and less destruction of the elements that make a healthy life possible. If men stuck loyally by their towns when they had thriven in wealth and position, we should, in a word, have a better town-bred stock. Mr. Chamberlain, at any rate, gives his fellow-countrymen a true lead in this matter. Let us hope that in the next generation his example will be widely followed, and that success won in a town shall not mean desertion of the town and its interests by the successful man
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