There was work enough for the most ardent of municipal reformers. But Dawson's vision passed beyond the limits of conventional reform. To him a city meant something besides the policeman and the scavenger; it had larger and higher functions than to maintain public order and to provide for the public health. For a city, as he conceived it, was a society, established by the divine will, as the family, the State, and the Church are established, for common life and common purpose and common action. It was not a bundle of individuals not '* a mere aggregation of individual bipeds," as Coleridge puts it, but an organism with definite functions to discharge; functions that grow in range and in importance as the city rises from its humble beginnings, and advances in power and dignity and fame. This truth was one that he held and set forth and maintained throughout his public life. In the noble address that he delivered at the opening of the Reference Library in 1866 he said only what he had often said before. That library, as he viewed it (I give you his own words), " was the first-fruits of a clear understanding that a great town exists to discharge towards the people of that town the duties that a great nation exists to discharge towards the people of that nation; THE NEW CIVIC IDEAL That a town exists here by the grace of God; that a great town is a solemn organism through which should flow, and in which should be shaped, all the highest, loftiest, and truest ends of man's intellectual and moral nature."
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