Daily Inspiration Quote by Josiah Strong

A clergyman diagnosing city hall with a moral stethoscope is never just talking about potholes. When Josiah Strong writes, "As a rule, our largest cities are the worst governed", he’s doing two things at once: making a seemingly common-sense observation, and smuggling in a whole theory of what modern America is becoming.

The phrasing matters. "As a rule" frames the claim as sober, almost statistical, which lets Strong sound empirical while keeping the judgment absolute. "Largest cities" isn’t simply geography; it’s shorthand for density, pluralism, immigrant neighborhoods, political machines, saloons, labor unrest, and the unnerving fact that anonymity weakens the social surveillance small-town Protestant culture relied on. "Worst governed" doubles as administrative critique and moral verdict. In Strong’s era, the city was often portrayed as the place where democracy gets sticky: patronage replaces virtue, votes get traded like currency, and reform is perpetually late to the scene.

The subtext is anxiety about who counts as "we". Late-19th-century urban America was being remade by immigration and industrial capitalism; city politics reflected that churn, sometimes through corruption, sometimes through rough-and-ready forms of representation that elites found vulgar. Strong’s line flatters the reader’s suspicion that problems come from bigness itself, not from the inequities and incentives that concentrate in big places.

It works because it turns governance into character. The city isn’t mismanaged; it’s morally fallen. And once you accept that framing, reform stops being just policy and becomes a crusade.