" Not by bread alone "—we all know that. Man does not live by bread alone, nor by law alone, nor by politics alone. And when we have done all that we can for his comfort, his health, his security, and for the health, comfort and safety of those who are dear to him, we have touched only one side of his nature, have not ministered to all his wants, have not given him all that he has a right to claim; mind and spirit have needs of their own as well as the body; and those needs must be satisfied. This means that the city which is a city must have its parks as well as its prisons, its art gallery as well as its asylum, its books and its libraries as well as its baths and washhouses, its schools as well as its sewers; that it must think of beauty and of dignity no less than of order and of health. Such was the task that Birmingham had before it when Dawson first set himself to preach the new municipal gospel; some of it obvious, even then, and some of it at that time a dim and distant ideal. You know in what wonderful ways it has been put into practice. You can estimate for yourselves how much Birmingham owes to Dawson for his share in the achievement. Let me indicate—it is all that I can do—the lines on which he worked. In the first place, he stoutly maintained that the principle of individual freedom must be supplemented by the principle of collective responsibility, and that the policy of " let-alone,'' at that time the dominant idea, was bad for the city and bad for the state. The voluntary system, he was convinced, has its limits. Public duties are not to be left to private enterprise. In the administration of
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTU1Nzc=