Excerpt from Vancouver, British Columbia: The Report of a Brief Investigation of Social Conditions in the City Which Indicate the Need of an Intensive Social Survey, the Lines of Which Are Herein Suggested

The city, like the individual, may be the builder of her own destiny. She has only to set up an ideal for herself, pass through a period of introspection and self-analysis to discover exactly her present state and the steps that must be taken that she may become the ideal city.

Until very recently, and it is true of the vast majority still, the great desideratum of our cities was bigness. They pressed on to this goal blindly, regardless of the waste of life and property and the other evils which attended such a mad career. These evils have become sufficiently great to give pause to some cities in America. Such a close student of American life as ex-ambassador James Bryce has said that the large city is an abnormality, and some of the crowded centres of population are beginning to question if the cost of being big is not too great. A few have found a new ideal - that of being better places in which to live.

Out of this civic self-analysis the social survey has grown. It is, therefore, not a muck - raking project, neither is it investigation merely for investigation's sake. It is rather the method by which the community seeks to learn the social facts of its life so that it may intelligently plan the next steps in social advance.

This movement on the part of cities to know themselves was instituted in London by Charles Booth, a wealthy shipowner. His work, which occupied the last twenty years of the last century, and cost a quarter-million dollars, was largely the inspiration and the basis for the widespread move ment for civic betterment which has since possessed old London. Next the City of York was studied by Seebohm Rowntree, and the social workers of the Old Land were placed in possession of the significant social facts concerning a large and a small city.

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