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upon which Mr. Stuart-Glennie and other sociologists have so ably insisted. The fundamental importance of these initial factors of region and occupation to all studies of races and types, of communities and institutions, of customs and laws, indeed of language and literature, of religion and art, even of ideals and individualities, must be my excuse if I seem to insist, in season and out of season, upon [Page: 61] the services of Le Play as one of the main founders of sociology; and this not only _(a)_ on account of his monographic surveys of modern industrial life–those “Monographies Sociales” from which our current economic studies of the condition of the worker, of the family budget, etc., descend–but _(b)_ yet more on account of his vital reconstruction of anthropology (albeit still far from adequately realised by most anthropologists) through his renewed insistence upon the elemental rustic origins of industry, family types, and social organisation alike, from these simplest reactions of man in his struggle for existence in varied and varying environment.

It does not suffice to recognise, with many economists, hunting, pastoral and agricultural formations, as states _preliminary_ to our present industrial and commercial, imperial, and financial order of civilisation. This view, still too commonly surviving, is rather of hindrance than help; what we need is to see our existing civilisation as the complex struggle and resultant of all these types and their developments to-day. So far, therefore, from leaving, as at present, these simple occupational types to the anthropologist, or at best giving him some scant hospitality within our city museum, we are learning to see how it is at one time the eager miner, or the conservative shepherd, or at another the adventurous fisher or hunter who comes concretely upon the first plane of national, imperial or international politics, and who awakens new strife among these. We not only begin to see, but the soldier frankly tells us, how the current sports of youth, and the unprecedented militarism of the past century, are alike profoundly connected with the hunting world. Hence the hope of peace lies not only, as most at present think in the civilised and civilising development of international law, or of culture intercourse, excellent though these are, but also in a fuller and complete return to nature than has been this recent and persistent obsession of our governing classes with the hunter world almost alone; in short, in adding the gentler, yet wider, experiences of the naturalist, the sterner experiences of other occupations also. Nor does such elementary recognition of these main social formations content us; their local differentiations must be noted and compared–a comprehensive regional survey, therefore, which does justice to each local variety of these great types; speaking henceforth of no mere abstract “hunter,” but of the specific hunting types of each climate, and distinguishing these as clearly as do our own milder sportsmen of deer-forest and the turnip field from themselves and from each other. After such needed surveys in detail, we may, indeed must, compare and generalise them.

Similarly for the pasture, the forest. Every tourist in this country is struck by the contrast of Swiss towns and cities with our own, and notes [Page: 62] too that on the Swiss pasture he finds a horde of cattle, while in Scotland or Yorkshire he left a flock of sheep. And not only the tourist, but the historian or the economist too often fail to see how Galashiels or Bradford are developments of the wool hamlet, now familiar to many in R.L. Stevenson’s native Swanston. Again, not only Swiss wealth, but Swiss character and institutions, go back essentially to the high pasture and the well-filled byre. That this rich Swiss cow-pasture rests on limestone, and the poor Scottish sheep-grazing upon comparatively unmouldering and impermeable gneiss, is no mere matter of geologist’s detail; it affords in each case the literal and concrete foundation-stone of the subsequent evolution of each region and population, and this not only in material and economic development, but even in higher and subtler outcomes, aesthetic, intellectual and moral.[4] It is for such reasons that one must labour and re-labour this geographic and determinist aspect of sociology, and this for no merely scientific reason, but also for practical ones. Nowhere perhaps have more good and generous souls considered how to better the condition of their people than in Swiss, or Irish, or Scottish valleys; yet it is one main reason of the continual failure of all such movements, and of such minds in the wider world as well, that they do not first acquaint themselves with the realities of nature and labour sufficiently to appreciate that the fundamental–I do not say the supreme–question is: what can be got out of limestone, and what can be got out of gneiss? Hence the rare educative value of such a concrete sociological diagram and model as was the Swiss Village at the Paris Exposition of 1900, for here geographic and economic knowledge and insight were expressed with artistic skill and sympathy as perhaps never before. Only as similar object-lessons are worked out for other countries, can we adequately learn, much less popularly teach, how from nature comes “rustics,” and from this comes civics. But civics and rustics make up the field of politics; they are the concrete of which politics become the abstract–commonly the too remotely abstract.

[4] For a fuller justification of this thesis as regards Switzerland, see the writer’s “International Exhibitions,” in _International Monthly_, October, 1900.

For final illustration, let us descend to the sea-level. There again, taking the fisher, each regional type must be traced in his contribution to his town. Take for instance the salmon fisher of Norway, the whaler of Dundee, the herring-fisher of Yarmouth, the cod-fisher of Newfoundland, the coral fisher of the AEgean; each is a definite varietal type, one developing or at least tending to develop characteristic normal family relations, and corresponding social outcomes in institutions; in which again the appropriate qualities and defects must be expressed, even as is the quality and twist of the hemp in the strength of the cable, or as is the chemistry and the microscopic structure of the alloy in the efficiency of the great gun. [Page: 63] Our neighbouring learned societies and museums geographical, geological and the rest, are thus avowedly and consciously so many winter shelters in which respective groups of regional surveyors tell their tales and compare their observations, in which they meet to compare their generalisations from their own observations made in the field with those made by others. So it must increasingly be for this youngest of societies. We may, we should, know best our Thames valley, our London basin, our London survey; but the progress of our science implies as increasingly varied and thorough an inquiry into rustic and civic regions and occupations and resultants throughout the whole world present and past, as does the corresponding world survey with our geologic neighbours.

I plead then for a sociological survey, rustic and civic, region by region, and insist in the first place upon the same itinerant field methods of notebook and camera, even for museum collections and the rest, as those of the natural sciences. The dreary manuals which have too long discredited those sciences in our schools, are now giving place to a new and fascinating literature of first-hand nature study. Similarly, those too abstract manuals of civics which are at present employed in schools[5] must be replaced by concrete and regional ones, their abstract counsels of political or personal perfection thus also giving place to a corresponding regional idealism which may then be supplemented from other regions as far as needs demand and circumstances allow.

[5] For a fuller review of these, compare the writer’s “City Development,” in _Contemporary Review_, October, 1904.

C–GEOGRAPHICAL DETERMINISM AND ITS DIFFICULTIES

To interpret then our tangle of ideas, both of the city and its citizens, let us now bring more fully to our transverse valley sections, and to each occupation separately, the geographical view-point which we have found of service to elucidate the development of towns and cities upon its longitudinal [Page: 64] slope. But this is neither more nor less than the method of Montesquieu, whose classic “Esprit des Lois” anticipates and initiates so much of that of later writers–Ritter, Buckle, Taine, or Le Play. Once more then let their common, or rather their resultant, doctrine be stated in terms expressing the latest of these more fully than the first. Given the region, its character determines the nature of the fundamental occupation, and this in turn essentially determines the type of family. The nature and method of the occupation must normally determine the mode of its organisation, e.g., the rise and character of a specialised directive class, and the nature of these occupational chiefs as contrasted with the people and with each other. Similarly, the types of family tend to develop their appropriate types of institutions, e.g., for justice, guidance, and of course notably in response to social environment as regards defence or attack.

Thus at this point in fact we seem to be pressing upon the student of sociology the essential argument of geographical and evolutionary determinism, in fact inviting him to adopt a view, indeed to commit himself to a method, which may be not only foreign to his habits, but repugnant to his whole view of life and history. And if able advocacy of this determinist view of society for at least the past five generations has not carried general conviction, why raise so controversial a suggestion, in the guise too of a method professing to harmonise all comers? Yet this is advisedly done; and as no one will deny some civil importance to geographical factors, let patience be granted to examine this aspect of the city’s map and shield, and to get from it what it can teach, under the present assurance to the philosophic and idealist critic that his view of other factors, higher and deeper, as supreme in human life, and therefore in city making, will not be forgotten, nor excluded from consideration when we come to them. All that is really insisted upon here is that if anything of naturalistic method of evolutionary conception is to be permitted at all, we must obviously proceed from this simple towards the more complex, and so begin with it here and now.

It is the appropriate slope or steppe, the needful rainfall, that conditions the growth of grass, this which conditions the presence of herds or flocks, and these again which determine the very existence of shepherds. These granted then, not only do the pastoral arts and crafts arise, but the patriarchal type and family develop, and this not only with their hospitality and other virtues, with their nomadic tendencies, at any rate, their unfixed land-tenure, very different from the peasant’s, but their slow and skilful [Page: 65] diplomacy (till the pasture is bared or grown again, as the negotiator’s interests incline). The patriarch in his venerable age, the caravaneer in his nomadic and exploring youth, his disciplined maturity, thus naturally develop as different types of chief and leader; and it is therefore not until this stage, when all is ready for the entry of Abraham or Job, of Mohammed the camel-driver, or Paul the tent-maker, that any real controversy can arise between the determinist and his opponent, between the democratic and the great-man theories of history, towards which these respectively incline.[6] And at that stage, may not the controversy stimulate a fruitful analysis? After all, what is the claim of free-will but to select among the factors afforded by a given set of circumstances? And the utmost stretch of determinism to which geography and civics may lead us obviously cannot prove the negative of this. But whether the psychologic origins of new ideals be internal to the mind of genius, or imparted by some external source, is a matter obviously beyond the scope of either the geographer or the historian of civics to settle. Enough surely for both controversialists if we use such a means of tabulating facts as to beg the question for neither view; and still better if we can present the case of each without injustice to either, nay, to each with its clearness increased by the sharp edge of contrast. If the geographical determinist thesis on one hand, and its ethical and psychological antithesis on the other, can thus clearly be defined and balanced, their working equilibrium is at hand, even should their complete synthesis remain beyond us.

[6] A fuller study, upon this method, of the essential origins of pastoral evolution, and of its characteristic modern developments, will be found in the writer’s “Flower of the Grass,” in _The Evergreen_, Edinburgh and Westminster, 1896. See also “La Science Sociale,” _passim_, especially in its earlier vols. or its number for Jan. 1905.

D–NEED OF ABSTRACT METHOD FOR NOTATION AND FOR INTERPRETATION

Not only such general geographical studies, but such social interpretations as those above indicated have long been in progress: witness the labours of whole schools of historians and critics, among whom Montsquieu and his immediate following, or in more recent times Buckle and Taine, are but the most prominent; witness the works of geographers like Humboldt, Ritter, Reclus, or of developmental technologists like Boucher de Perthes and regional economists like Le Play. The main lines of a concrete and evolutionary sociology (or at [Page: 66] least _sociography_) have thus been laid down for us; but the task now before us, in our time, in such a society as this–and indeed in such a paper as the present one–its that of extracting from all this general teaching its essential scientific method, one everywhere latent and implicit, but nowhere fully explicit, or at least adequately systematised.

It is in fact only as we can agree upon some definite and orderly method of description that our existing literature of social surveys can be adequately compared or new ones co-operatively undertaken. Hence the importance of discussions of scientific method such as those who have so largely occupied our first volume. Yet, I submit, here lies the means of escaping from these too abstract (and consequently too static) presentments of the general methodology of social science into which sociologists are constantly falling; and to which must be largely ascribed the prevalent distaste for sociology so general in this would-be practical-minded community in which we find ourselves, as indeed also the comparative unattractiveness of our studies to the body of specialist scientific workers, not even excepting those within what we consider sociological fields.

The history of each science, be it mathematics or astronomy, botany, zoology or geology, shows us that it is not enough to have the intelligent observer, or even the interpretative thinker with his personally expressed doctrine. This must be clearly crystallised into a definite statement, method, proposition, “law” or theory, stated in colourless impersonal form before it is capable of acceptance and incorporation into the general body of science. But while astronomer and geologist and naturalist can and do describe both the observational results and their general conceptions in literary form, requiring from the ordinary reader but the patience to master a few unfamiliar terms and ideas, they also carry on their work by help of definite and orderly technical methods, descriptive and comparative, analytic and synthetic. These, as far as possible, have to be crystallised beyond their mere verbal statement into formulae, into tabular and graphic presentments, and thus not only acquire greater clearness of statement, but become more and more active agencies of inquiry–in fact, become literal _thinking-machines_. But while the mathematician has his notations and his calculus, the geographer and geologist their maps, reliefs and sections, the naturalist his orderly classificatory methods, it has been the misfortune and delay of political economy, and no small cause of that “notorious discord and sterility” with which Comte reproached it, that [Page: 67] its cultivators have so commonly sought to dispense with the employment of any definite scientific notations; while even its avowed statisticians, in this country especially, have long resisted the consistent use of graphic methods.

I submit, therefore, for discussion, as even more urgent and pressing than that of the general and abstract methodology of the social sciences, the problem of elaborating a concrete descriptive method readily applicable to the study and comparison of human societies, to cities therefore especially. To do justice to this subject, not only the descriptive labours of anthropologists, but much of the literature of sociology would have to be gone through from the “Tableau Economique” of the Physiocratic School to the “Sociological Tables” of Mr. Spencer, and still more fruitfully to more recent writers. Among these, besides here recognising specially the work of Mr. Booth and its stimulus to younger investigators, I would acknowledge the helpful and suggestive impulse from the group of social geographers which has arisen from the initiative of Le Play[7], and whose classification, especially in its later forms[8], cannot but be of interest and value to everyone whose thought on social questions is not afloat upon the ocean of the abstract without chart or bearings.

[7] La Nomenclature Sociale (Extrait de La Revue, “La Science Sociale,” Dec. 1886) Paris, Firmin-Diact, 1887.

[8] Demoulins, La Science Sociale d’apres F. Le Play 1882-1905; Classification Sociale, “La Science Sociale,” Jan. 1905.

Yet with all respect to each and all these classifications and methods, indeed with cordially acknowledge personal obligation and indebtedness to them from first to last, no one of these seems fully satisfactory for the present purpose; and it is therefore needful to go into the matter afresh for ourselves, though utilising these as fully as we can.

E–THE CITY-COMPLEX AND ITS USUAL ANALYSIS

In the everyday world, in the city as we find it, what is the working classification of ideas, the method of thought of its citizens? That the citizens no more think of themselves as using any particular sociological method than did M. Jourdain of talking prose does not really matter, save that it makes our observation, both of them and it, easier and more trustworthy.

They are speaking and thinking for the most part of [Page: 68] People and of Affairs; much less of places. In the category of People, we observe that individuals, self and others, and this in interest, perhaps even more than in interests, commonly take precedence of groups. Institutions and Government are, however, of general interest, the state being much more prominent than is the church; the press, for many, acting as the modern substitute for the latter. In the world of Affairs, commerce takes precedence of industry, while sport runs hard upon both. War, largely viewed by its distant spectators as the most vivid form of sport, also bulks largely. Peace is not viewed as a positive ideal, but essentially as a passive state, at best, of non-war, more generally of latent war. Central among places are the bank, the market (in its financial forms before the material ones). Second to these stand the mines then the factories, etc.; and around these the fixed or floating fortresses of defence. Of homes, that of the individual alone is seriously considered, at most those of his friends, his “set,” his peers, but too rarely even of the street, much less the neighbourhood, at least for their own sake, as distinguished from their reaction upon individual and family status or comfort.

This set of views is obviously not easy of precise analysis of exact classification. In broad outline, however, a summary may be made, and even tabulated as follows:–

THE EVERYDAY TOWN AND ITS ACTIVITIES.

PEOPLE AFFAIRS PLACES (a) INDIVIDUALS (a) COMMERCE (a) MARKET, BANK, etc. (Self and others). INDUSTRY, etc. FACTORY, MINE, etc. SPORT.

(b) GOVERNMENT(S) (b) WAR (b) FORT, FIELD, etc. Temporal and Spiritual and Peace
(State and Church). (Latent War).

Next note how from the everyday world of action, there arises a corresponding thought-world also. This has, [Page: 69] of course, no less numerous
and varied elements, with its resultantly complex local colour; But a selection will suffice, of which the headings may be printed below those of the preceding scheme, to denote how to the objective elements there are subjective elements corresponding–literal reflections upon the pools of memory–the slowly flowing stream of tradition. Thus the extended diagram, its objective elements expressed in yet more general terms, may now be read anew (noting that mirror images are fully reversed).

PEOPLE AFFAIRS PLACES

“TOWN” (a) INDIVIDUALS (a) OCCUPATIONS (a) WORK-PLACES (b) INSTITUTIONS (b) WAR (b) WAR-PLACES

“SCHOOLS” (b) HISTORY (b) STATISTICS AND (b) GEOGRAPHY (“Constitutional”) HISTORY
(“Military”)
(a) BIOGRAPHY (a) ECONOMICS (a) TOPOGRAPHY

Here then we have that general relation of the town life and its “schools,” alike of thought and of education, which must now be fully investigated.

Such diagrammatic presentments, while of course primarily for the purpose of clear expression and comparison, are also frequently suggestive–by “inspection,” as geometers say–of relations not previously noticed. In both ways, we may see more clearly how prevalent ideas and doctrines have arisen as “reflections upon” the life of action, and even account for their qualities and their defects–their partial truth or their corresponding inadequacy, according to our own appreciative or depreciative standpoint. Thus as regards “People,” in the first column we see expressed briefly how to (a) the individual life, with the corresponding vivid interest in biography, corresponds the “great man theory” of history. Conversely with _(b)_ alone is associated the insistance upon institutional developments as the main factor. Passing to the middle column, that of “Affairs,” we may note in connection with _(b)_ say the rise of statistics in association with the needs of war, a point connected with its too empiric character; or note again, a too common converse weakness of economic theory, its inadequate inductive [Page: 70] verification. Or finally, in the column of “Place,” the long weakness of geography as an educational subject, yet is periodic renewal upon the field of war, is indicated. We might in fact continue such a comparison of the existing world of action and of ideas, into all the schools, those of thought and practice, no less than those of formal instruction; and thus we should more and more clearly unravel how their complexity and entanglement, their frequent oppositions and contradictions are related to the various and warring elements of the manifold “Town” life from which they derive and survive. Such a fuller discussion, however, would too long delay the immediate problem–that of understanding “Town” and its “School” in their origins and simplest relations.

F–PROPOSED METHODICAL ANALYSIS

(1) THE TOWN

More fully to understand this two-fold development of Town and School we have first of all apparently to run counter to the preceding popular view, which is here, as in so many cases, the precise opposite of that reached from the side of science. This, as we have already so fully insisted, must set out with geography, thus literally _replacing_ People and Affairs in our scheme above.

Starting then once more with the simple biological formula:

ENVIRONMENT … CONDITIONS … ORGANISM

this has but to be applied and defined by the social geographer to become

REGION … OCCUPATION … FAMILY-type and Developments

which summarises precisely that doctrine of Montesquieu and his successors already insisted on. Again, in but slight variation from Le Play’s simplest phrasing _(“Lieu, travail, famille”)_ we have

PLACE … WORK … FOLK

It is from this simple and initial social formula that we have now to work our way to a fuller understanding of Town and School. [Page: 71] Immediately, therefore, this must be traced upward towards its complexities. For Place, it is plain, is no mere topographic site. Work, conditioned as it primarily is by natural advantages, is thus really first of all _place-work_. Arises the field or garden, the port, the mine, the workshop, in fact the _work-place_, as we may simply generalise it; while, further, beside this arise the dwellings, the _folk-place_.

Nor are these by any means all the elements we are accustomed to lump together into Town. As we thus cannot avoid entering into the manifold complexities of town-life throughout the world and history, we must carry along with us the means of unravelling these; hence the value of this simple but precise nomenclature and its regular schematic use. Thus, while here keeping to simple words in everyday use, we may employ and combine them to analyse out our Town into its elements and their inter-relations with all due exactitude, instead of either leaving our common terms undefined, or arbitrarily defining them anew, as economists have alternately done–too literally losing or shirking essentials of Work in the above formula, and with these missing essentials of Folk and Place also.

Tabular and schematic presentments, however, such as those to which we are proceeding, are apt to be less simple and satisfactory to reader than to writer; and this even when in oral exposition the very same diagram has been not only welcomed as clear, but seen and felt to be convincing. The reason of this difficulty is that with the spoken exposition the audience sees the diagram grow upon the blackboard; whereas to produce anything of the same effect upon the page, it must be printed at several successive stages of development. Thus our initial formula,

PLACE … WORK … FOLK

readily develops into

FOLK

PLACE-WORK WORK FOLK-WORK (Natural advantages) (Occupation)

PLACE

This again naturally develops into a regular table, of which the [Page: 72] filling up of some of the squares has been already suggested above, and that of the remaining ones will be intelligible on inspection:–

PLACE FOLK WORK-FOLK FOLK (“Natives”) (“Producers”)

PLACE-WORK WORK FOLK-WORK

PLACE WORK-PLACE FOLK-PLACE

So complex is the idea of even the simplest Town–even in such a rustic germ as the “farm-town” of modern Scottish parlance, the _ton_ of place-names without number.

The varying development of the Folk into social classes or castes night next be traced, and the influence and interaction of all the various factors of Place, Work, and Family tabulated. Suffice it here, however, for the present to note that such differentiation does take place, without entering into the classification and comparison of the protean types of patrician and plebeian throughout geography and history.

G–ANALYSIS CONTINUED.–(2) THE SCHOOL

Once and again we have noted how from the everyday life of action–the Town proper of our terminology–there arises the corresponding subjective world–the _Schools_ of thought, which may express itself sooner or later in schools of education. The types of people, their kinds and styles of work, their whole environment, all become represented in the mind of the community, and these react upon the individuals, their activities, their place itself. Thus (the more plainly the more the community is a simple and an isolated one, but in appreciable measure everywhere and continually) there have obviously arisen local turns of thought and modes of speech, ranging from shades of accept and idiom to distinctive dialect or language. Similarly, there is a characteristic variety of occupational activity, a style of workmanship, a way of doing business. There are distinctive [Page: 73] manners and customs–there is, in short, a certain recognisable likeness, it may be an indefinably subtle or an unmistakably broad and general one, which may be traced in faces and costumes, in tongue and literature, in courtesy and in conflict, in business and in policy, in street and in house, from hovel to palace, from prison to cathedral. Thus it is that every folk comes to have its own ways, and every town its own school.

While the complex social medium has thus been acquiring its characteristic form and composition, a younger generation has been arising. In all ways and senses, Heredity is commonly more marked than variation–especially when, as in most places at most times, such great racial, occupational, environmental transformations occur as those of modern cities. In other words, the young folk present not only an individual continuity with their organic predecessors which is heredity proper, but with their social predecessors also. The elements of organic continuity, which we usually think of first of all as organic though of course psychic also, are conveniently distinguished as the _inheritance_–a term in fact which the biologist seeks to deprive of its common economic and social senses altogether, leaving for these the term _heritage_, material or immaterial alike. This necessary distinction between the inheritance, bodily and mental, and the heritage, economic and social, obviously next requires further elaboration, and with this further precision of language also. For the present, let us leave the term heritage to the economist for the material wealth with which he is primarily concerned, and employ the term _tradition_ for these immaterial and distinctively social elements we are here specially considering. This in fact is no new proposal, but really little more than an acceptance of ordinary usage. Broadly speaking, tradition is in the life of the community what memory is for its individual units. The younger generation, then, not only inherits an organic and a psychic diathesis; not only has transmitted to it the accumulations, instruments and land of its predecessors, but grows up in their tradition also. The importance of imitation in this process, a matter of common experience, has been given the fullest sociological prominence, by M. Tarde especially.[9] Thanks to these and other convergent lines of thought, we no longer consent to look at the acquirement of the social tradition as a matter requiring to be imposed upon reluctant youth almost entirely from without, and are learning anew as of old, with the simplest and the most developed peoples, the barbarians and the Greeks, to recognise and respect, and, if it may be, to nourish the process of self-instruction, viewed as normal accompaniment of each developing being throughout the phases of its [Page: 74] organic life, the stages of its social life. Upon the many intermediate degrees of advance and decline, however, between these two extremes of civilisation, specific institutions for the instruction of youth arise, each in some way an artificial substitute, or at least a would-be accelerant, for the apprenticeship of imitation in the school of experience and the community’s tradition, which we term a school in the restricted and pedagogic sense. This whole discussion, however, has been in order to explain and to justify the present use of the term “School” in that wide sense in which the historian of art or thought–the sociologist in fact–has ever used the term, while yet covering the specialised pedagogic schools of all kinds also.

[9] Tarde, “L’imitation Sociale,” and other works.

Once more, then, and in the fullest sense, every folk has its own tradition, every town its school.

We need not here discriminate these unique and characteristic elements to which the art-historians–say of Venice and of Florence, of Barbizon or Glasgow–specially attend from those most widely distributed ones, in which the traditions and schools of all towns within the same civilisation broadly agree. Indeed, even the most widely distributed of these–say from Roman law to modern antiseptic surgery–arose as local schools before they became general ones.

Similarly for the general social tradition. The fundamental occupations and their division of labour, their differentiation in detail and their various interactions up to our own day, at first separately considered, are now seen to be closely correlated with the status of woman; while all these factors determine not only the mode of union of the parents, but their relation to the children, the constitution of the family, with which the mode of transmission of property is again thoroughly interwoven.

H–TOWN AND SCHOOL COMPARED

“TOWN” FOLK

WORK

PLACE

SURVEY

CRAFT-KNOWLEDGE

“SCHOOL” CUSTOM

We may now summarise and tabulate our comparison of Town and School,[10] and on the schema (p.75) it will be seen [Page: 76] that each element of the second is printed in the position of a mirror-reflection of the first. This gives but the merest outline, which is ready, however, to be applied in various ways and filled up accordingly. A step towards this is made in the next and fuller version of the scheme (p. 77). It will be noted in this that the lower portion of the diagram, that of School, is more fully filled up than is the upper. This is partly for clearness, but partly also to suggest that main elements in the origins of natural sciences and geography, of economics and social science, are not always so clearly realised as they might be. The preceding diagram, elaborating that of Place, Work, Folk (p. 75), however, at once suggests these. Other features of the scheme will appear on inspection; and the reader will find it of interest and suggestiveness to prepare a blank schedule and fill it up for himself.

[10] For the sake of brevity, an entire chapter has been omitted, discussing the manifold origins of distinct governing classes, whether arising from the Folk, or superimposed upon them from without, in short, of the contrast of what we may broadly call patricians and plebeians, which so constantly appears through history, and in the present also. These modes of origin are all in association respectively with Place, Work, and Family, or some of the various interactions of these. Origin and situation, migration, individual or general, with its conflict of races, may be indicated among the first group of factors; technical efficiency and its organising power among the second; individual qualities and family stocks among the third, as also military and administrative aptitude, and the institutional privileges which so readily arise from them. Nor need we here discuss the rise of institutions, so fully dealt with by sociological writers. Enough for the present then, if institutions and social classes be taken as we find them.

These two forms of the same diagram, the simple and the more developed, thus suggest comparison with the scheme previously outlined, that of People, Affairs, Places (p. 68), and is now more easily reconciled with this; the greater prominence popularly given to People and Affairs being expressed upon the present geographic and evolutionary scheme by the ascending position and more emphatic printing (or by viewing the diagram as a transparency from the opposite side of the leaf).

In the column of People, the deepening of custom into morals is indicated. Emphasis is also placed upon the development of law in connection with the rise of governing classes, and its tendency to dominate the standards previously taken as morals–in fact, that tendency of moral law to become static law, a process of which history is full.

GOVERNING
=========
=========
CLASSES
=======
=======
^
|
FAMILY TYPES
============
———————————————- INDUSTRIES
==========
———-
———————————————- (FOLK-PLACE)
REGION (WORK PLACE) ———— ====== ———— (TOWN)
| ======
|
V
——————————————– |
V
SURVEY (“SCHOOL”)
====== ==========
!–LANDSCAPE (CRAFT-TRADITION)
—————–
(FOLK-LORE)
?–TERRITORY ———–
|
|
V
——————————————— |
V
[NATURAL [APPLIED [SOCIAL
——– ======== =======
SCIENCES] SCIENCES] SCIENCES] ——— ========= =========
|
|
V
——————————————- | CUSTOMS
V ——-
MORALS
======
GEOGRAPHY ECONOMICS ——
——— ========= &
LAWS
====
====

In the present as in the past, we may also note upon the scheme the different lines of Place, Work and Folk on which respectively develop the natural sciences, the applied or [Page: 78] technical sciences, and finally the social sciences, and the generalising of these respectively.

Thus, as we see the popular survey of regions, geography in its literal and initial sense, deepening into the various analyses of this and that aspect or element of the environment which we call the natural sciences–but which we might with advantage also recognise as what they really are, each a _geolysis_–so these sciences or geolyses, again, are tending to reunite into a higher geography considered as an account of the evolution of the cosmos.

Again, in the column of School, corresponding to Work, we have the evolution of craft knowledge into the applied sciences, an historic process which specialist men of science and their public are alike apt to overlook, but which is none the less vitally important. For we cannot really understand, say Pasteur, save primarily as a thinking peasant; or Lister and his antiseptic surgery better than as the shepherd, with his tar-box by his side; or Kelvin or any other electrician, as the thinking smith, and so on. The old story of geometry, as “_ars metrike_,” and of its origin from land-surveying, for which the Egyptian hieroglyph is said to be that of “rope stretching,” in fact, applies far more fully than most realise, and the history of every science, of course already thus partially written, will bear a far fuller application of this principle. In short, the self-taught man, who is ever the most fertile discoverer, is made in the true and fundamental school–that of experience.

The need of abbreviating the recapitulation of this, however, sooner or later develops the school in the pedagogic sense, and its many achievements, its many failures in accomplishing this, might here be more fully analysed.

Still more evident is this process in the column of Folk. From the mother’s knee and the dame’s school of the smallest folk-place, the townlet or hamlet, _ton_ or home, up to the royal and priestly school of the law of ancient capitals, or from the “humanities” of a mediaeval university to the “Ecole de Droit” of a modern metropolis, the series of essential evolutionary stages may be set down. Or in our everyday present, [Page: 79] the rise of schools of all kinds, primary, secondary, higher up to the current movement towards university colleges, and from these to civic and regional universities, might again be traced. The municipalisation of education is thus in fact expressed, and so on.

Leaving the schools in the main to speak for themselves of their advancing and incipient uses, a word may be said upon the present lines.

As a first and obvious application of this mode of geographic study of cities appears the criticism, and; when possible, the amendment of the city’s plan, the monotonous rectangularity of the American city, and the petty irregularity more common in our own, being alike uneconomic and inartistic because ungeographic, irrational because irregional. With the improvement of communications, the physicist’s point of view thus introduced–that of the economy of the energies of the community–is only beginning; the economy of fuel, the limitation of smoke and fogs being symptoms of this and pointing to a more economic organisation of industrial activities generally. But this next carries with it the improved efficiency of the producers themselves, with whom, however, the standpoint changes from the mere economisation of physical energies to the higher economy of organic evolution. The convention of traditional economics, that the productive capacity of the actual labourer is the sole concern of his science, thus gives place to what is at once the original conception of economics and the evolutionist one, viz., that the success of industry is ultimately measured neither by its return in wealth of the capitalist nor in money wages of the labourer, nor even by both put together, but in the results of industry upon the concrete environment, the family budget, the home, and the corresponding state of development of the family–its deterioration or progress. The organisation of industrial groups or of representative institutions found conducive to the well-being and progress of these prime civic units, the families, may now be traced into its highest outcome in city government. The method of analysis and graphic statement thus outlined may be shown to be even capable of useful application towards the statement of the best [Page: 80] arguments of both progressive and moderate parties in city politics.

Passing from Politics to Culture. Culture, the needs of this also become clearer; each community developing a similar general series of culture institutions, from the simplest presentation of its geography, landscape and architecture, to the complex development of industrial, technical and scientific instruction; and for provision also for the institutions of custom and ethic in school, law, and church. Just as place, occupation, and family are intimately connected in the practical world, so their respective culture institutions must more and more be viewed as a whole. Civic improvers will find their ideals more realisable as they recognise the complex unity of the city as a social development of which all the departments of action and thought are in organic relation, be it of health or disease. The view of theoretic civics as concrete sociology, and of practical civics as applied sociology may be more simply expressed as the co-adjustment of social survey and social service, now becoming recognised as rational, indeed in many cities being begun.

I–DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOOL, AND ITS REACTION UPON TOWN

The reactions of the School upon the Town are observed in practice to be of very different values;–how are these differences to be explained?

From the very first the school is essentially one of memory, the impress of the town-life, even at its best and highest individual quality and impressiveness, as in the work of a great master, the observation and memory of which may long give his stamp to the work of his followers. The fading of this into dullness, yet the fixing of it as a convention, is familiar to all in arts and crafts, but is no less real in the general lapse of appreciation of environment. Most serious of all is the fixation of habit and custom, so that at length “custom lies upon us with a weight heavy as death, and deep [Page 81] almost as life.” This continual fixation of fashionable standards as moral ones is thus a prime explanation of each reformer’s difficulty in making his moral standard the fashionable one, and also, when his doctrine has succeeded, of the loss of life and mummification of form which it so speedily undergoes.

Of conventional “education,” considered as the memorisation of past records, however authoritative and classic, the decay is thus intelligible and plain, and the repetition of criticisms already adequately made need not therefore detain us here.

For this process is there no remedy? Science here offers herself–with senses open to observe, and intellect awake to interpret. Starting with Place, she explores and surveys it, from descriptive travel books at very various levels of accuracy, she works on to atlas and gazetteer, and beyond these to world-globe and “Geographie Universelle.” With her charts and descriptions we are now more ready for a journey; with her maps and plans we may know our own place as never before; nay, rectify it, making the rough places plain and the crooked straight; even restoration may come within our powers.

Similarly as regards Work. Though mere empiric craft-mastery dies with the individual, and fails with his successors, may we not perpetuate the best of this? A museum of art treasures, a collection of the choicest examples of all times and lands, will surely raise us from our low level of mechanical toil; nay, with these carefully observed, copied, memorised, and duly examined upon, we shall be able to imitate them, to reproduce their excellencies, even to adapt them to our everyday work. To the art museum we have thus but to add a “School of Design,” to have an output of more and less skilled copyists. The smooth and polished successes of this new dual institution, responding as they do to the mechanical elements of modern work and of the mechanical worker-mind, admitting also of ready multiplications as patterns, ensure the wide extension of the prevalent style of imitating past styles, designing patchwork of these; and even admit of its scientific reduction to a definite series of grades, which imitative youth may easily pass onwards from the age of rudest innocence to that of art-knowledge and certificated art-mastery. Our School of Design thus becomes a School of Art, a length a College, dominating the instruction of the nation, to the satisfaction not only of its promoters, but of the general public and their representatives, so that annual votes justly increase. Lurking discontent may now and then express itself, but is for practical purposes negligible.

[Page: 82] The example of art accumulation and art instruction is thus naturally followed in other respects. For the commercial information of the public, varied representative exhibitions–primarily, therefore, international ones–naturally suggest themselves; while so soon as expansion of imperial and colonial interests comes upon the first plane, a corresponding permanent Exhibition is naturally instituted. But when thus advancing commercial instruction, we must also recognise the claims of industry in all its crafts and guilds, and in fact the technical instruction of the community generally. Hence the past, present, and promised rise of technical institutes upon increasing scales of completeness.

In the rise of such a truly encylopaedic system of schools, the university cannot permanently be forgotten. Since from the outset we have recognised the prime elements of the school in observation and memory, the testing of these by examinations–written, oral, and practical–however improvable in detail, must be fairly recognised, and the examining body or university has therefore to be adopted as the normal crown of our comprehensive educational system. Teaching, however is found to be increasingly necessary, especially to examination, and for this the main field left open is in our last column, that of People. Their lore of the past, whether of sacred or classical learning, their history, literature, and criticism, are already actively promoted, or at any rate adequately endowed at older seats of learning; while the materials, resources, conditions and atmosphere are here of other kinds. Hence the accessibility of the new University of London to the study of sociology, as yet alone among its peers.

Hence, beside the great London, maritime, commercial and industrial, residential and governmental, there has been growing up, tardily indeed, as compared with smaller cities, yet now all the more massively and completely, a correspondingly comprehensive system of schools; so that the historic development of South Kensington within the last half century, from International Exhibitions of Work, Natural History Museums of Place onwards to its present and its contemplated magnitude, affords a striking exemplification of the present view and its classification, which is all the more satisfactory since this development has been a gradual accretion.

Enough then has been said to show that the rise of schools, their qualities and their defects, are all capable of treatment upon the present lines; but if so, may we not go farther, and ask by what means does thought and life cope with their defects, especially that fixation of memory, even at its best, that evil side of examination and the like, which we often call Chinese in the bad sense, but which we see arises so naturally everywhere?

[Page: 83] J–FROM “SCHOOL” TO “CLOISTER”

The preceding view is, as yet, too purely determinist. The due place of ideals, individual and corporate, in their reaction upon the function and the structure of the city, and even upon its material environment, has next to be recognised. For where the town merely makes and fixes its industry and makes its corresponding schools, where its habits and customs become its laws, even its morality, the community, as we have just seen, sinks into routine, and therefore decay. To prevent this a twofold process of thought is ever necessary, critical and constructive. What are these? On the one hand, a continual and critical selection among the ideas derived from experience, and the formulation of these as Ideals: and further, the organisation of these into a larger and larger whole of thought; in fact, a Synthesis of a new kind. This critical spirit it is which produced the prophets of Israel, the questioning of Socrates, and so on, to the journalistic and other criticism of life to-day. The corresponding constructive endeavour is now no mere School of traditional learning or of useful information. It is one of science in a new and reorganised sense; one of philosophy also, one of ideals above all.

As from the Schools of the Law, as over against these, arise the prophets, so from the technical and applied sciences, the descriptive natural sciences, should arise the scientific thinkers, reinterpreting each his field of knowledge and giving us the pure sciences–pure geometry henceforth contrasted with mere land surveying, morphology with mere anatomy, and so on; while instead of the mere concrete encyclopaedia from Pliny or Gesner to Diderot or Chambers, vast subjective reorganisations of knowledge, philosophic systems, now appear. Similarly, the mere observations of the senses and their records in memory become transformed into the images of the poet, the imagery too of the artist, for art proper is only thus born. That mere imitation of nature, which so commonly in the graphic arts (though happily but rarely in music) has been mistaken for [Page: 84] art, thus modestly returns to its proper place–that of the iconography of descriptive science.

Thus from the Schools of all kinds of knowledge, past and present, we pass into the no less varied Cloisters of contemplation, meditation, imagination. With the historian we might explore the Cloisters of the past, built at one time from the current ideals of the Good, at another of the True, at another of the Beautiful; indeed, in widely varying measures and proportions from all of these. How far each of these now expresses the present, how far it may yet serve the future, is obviously a question of questions, yet for that very reason one exceeding our present limits. Enough if in city life the historic place of what is here generalised under this antique name of Cloister be here recognised; and in some measure the actual need, the potential place be recognised also. Here is the need and use, beyond the fundamental claims of the material life of the Town, and the everyday sanity of the Schools, with all their observations and information, their commonsense and experience, their customs and conventions, even their morals and their law, for a deeper ethical insight than any rule or precedent can afford, for a fuller and freer intellectual outlook than that which has been derived from any technical experience or empiric skill, for an imagery which is no mere review of the phantasmagoria of the senses. In our age of the multiplication and expansion of towns, of their enrichment and their impoverishment, of the multiplication and enrichment of schools also, it is well for the sociologist to read from history, as he then may more fully see also around him that it is ever some fresh combination of these threefold products of the Cloister–ideal theory, and imagery–emotional, intellectual, sensuous–which transforms the thought-world of its time.

The philosopher of old in his academic grove, his porch, the mediaeval monk within his studious cloister’s pale, are thus more akin to the modern scientific thinker than he commonly realises–perhaps because he is still, for the most part, of the solitary individualism of the hermit of the Thebaid, of Diogenes in his tub. Assuredly, they are less removed in essential psychology than their derived fraternities, their [Page: 85] respective novices and scholars, have often thought. It is thus no mere play of language which hands on from the one to the other the “travail de Benedictin,” though even here the phrase is inadequate savouring too much of the school, into which each cloister of every sort declines sooner or later, unless even worse befall.

The decay of the cloister, though thus on the one hand into and with the school, may also take place within itself, since imagination and ideal may be evil, and theory false. That examples of all these decays abound in the history of religion, of philosophy, of art also, is a commonplace needing no illustration. Nor should the modern investigator think his science or himself immune to the same or kindred germs in turn.

K–THE CITY PROPER

Now, “at long last,” we are ready to enter the city proper. This is not merely the Town of place and work and folk, even were this at their economic best. It is not enough to add the School, even at its completest; nor the cloister, though with this a yet greater step towards the city proper is made. For though this is not itself the City, its ideals of human relations, its theory of the universe and man, its artistic expression and portrayal of all these, ever sooner or later react upon the general view and conduct of life. Hence the Academe of Plato and the Lyceum of Aristotle, the mediaeval cloister and the modern Research Institute, have been so fertile, so creative in their influence upon the city’s life, from which they seemed to be retired. Hence it is ever some new combination of the threefold product of the cloister–ideal, idea, and image–which transforms the world, which opens each new epoch. Each new revelation and vision, each system of thought, each new outburst of poetry and song, has moved the men of its age by no mere mechanical pressure of economic need or external force, by no mere scholastic instruction, but in a far subtler way, and into new and unexpected groupings, as the [Page: 86] sand upon Chladon’s vibrating plate leaps into a new figure with each thrill of the violinist’s bow.

Instead of simply developing our morals from custom, and therefore codifying them into law as in the school they are now boldly criticised, as in part if not in whole, hindrances to a better state of things. As this becomes more and more clearly formulated as an ideal, its ethic transcendence of convention and law not only becomes clear, but the desire for its realisation becomes expressed. This may be with all degrees of clearness of reason and vividness of imagery, yet may remain long or altogether in the plane of literature, as has Plato’s Republic or More’s Utopia–standard and characteristic types of the cloister library as we may call it, one of inestimable value to the world in the past, and perhaps in our time needed as much as ever to help us to see somewhat beyond the output of the busy presses of town and school. Yet our ideal, our “Civitas Dei,” “Civitas Solis,” need not remain unrealised: it may be not only seriously planned towards realisation, as was Platonopolis of old, but bravely founded, as has been done in cases without number, from the ancient world to modern communities, by no means wholly unsuccessful. Though in our great industrial towns, our long settled regions, such new departures seem less easy, the principle remains valid–that it is in our ideal of polity and citizenship, and in our power of realising this, that the city proper has its conception and its birth. Again, instead of simply deriving our thought from experience we now project our clarified thought into action and into education; so that from cloister of philosophy, and from its long novitiate of silence, there grows up the brotherhood of culture, the culture city itself. Similarly in art, we no longer imitate nature, nor copy traditional designs. Art proper appears, shaping bronze and marble into images of the gods, and on a burnt and ruined hill-fort renewing the Parthenon. In general terms, instead of simply adjusting, as in the school, our mental picture to the outward facts, we reverse the process; and with a new art conception, be it good or bad, we transform the outward world, like wax under the seal. Thus from the [Page: 88] cloister and chapel of the musician, the studio-cell of the artist, the scriptorium of the poet, comes forth the architect, remodelling the city around his supreme material expression and home of its moral and material reorganisation, its renewed temporal and spiritual powers. Of this, the city proper, the Acropolis of Athens, the Temple of Jerusalem, the Capitol and Forum of Rome are classic and central examples, and in the mediaeval city, pre-eminently the cathedral; though beside this we must not forget the town house and its belfry, the guild houses, the colleges, the great place, the fountains, the city cross, and if last, still best if good at all, the streets and courts and homes. Returning once more to the history of educational development, we have here a means of unravelling the apparently perplexing history of universities. For the university past or present has but its foundations in the school, with its local and its general tradition, whatever may be the accordance of these with well-ascertained fact, its true novitiate can only be afforded in the cloister of reflection and research, of interpretation and synthesis; while for its full development it needs the perpetual renewal of that generous social life–that inspiring intercourse “of picked adolescents and picked senescents”–which has marked the vital periods of every university worthy of the name.

Realisation in
ACROPOLIS }
CATHEDRAL } CITY UNIVERSITY }
(EU)-POLITY
^
| CULTURE
| ^
Rise towards |
Formulation | ART
and Realisation, Rise through ^ through |
{ Politics { Action Rise to { Church Militant { Education expression ^ ^ ^
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | “IMAGERY”
| | AESTHETICS
| | (Beautiful)
SOCIAL. ECON. POL. “IDEAS”
^ SYNTHETICS
| (True)
“IDEALS”
ETHICS
(Good) Criticism, Selection, Re-synthesis, in
HERMITAGE
ACADEME
CLOISTER, etc.

In summary then, to the town has been added the school, with its advantages, its increasingly obvious limitations also, which it is for the cloister to remedy–even the advantages of the barrack finding a main element of its claim in this no less than in its professed training as regards citizenship. But here also it is for few to remain, albeit free for each to return at will. Ideals, to survive, must surely live, that is, be realised; hence for full life one needs “to meditate with the free solitary; yet to live secular, and serve mankind.”

TOWN | CITY
FOLK | POLITY
|
WORK | CULTURE
|
PLACE | ART
—————————–+——————————– SURVEY | IMAGERY
|
KNOWLEDGE | IDEAS
|
MORALS | SOC. ECON.
| IDEALS
LAW | ETHICS
SCHOOL | CLOISTER

L–THE CITY COMPLIED: TOWN, SCHOOL, CLOISTER, AND CITY PROPER

In course of this fourfold analysis, it is plain that we have reached the very converse–or at all events the [Page: 90] complement–of that geographical determinism with which we started, and that we have returned to a view corresponding to the popular one (of “People, Affairs, Places,” p. 69), which we then set aside for the reasons given. The “great man theory” of history, at best less crudely stated, thus reappears; in short, to the initial thesis we have now the distinct antithesis. It is time, therefore, to bring these together towards the needed synthesis. Hence to the page (p. 77) on which was summarised the determinist view of Town and School, we now require the complemental statement upon page (p. 87) of Cloister and City proper. Nor must we be content, with too many controversialists hitherto, to keep in view only one at a time; but by folding back the pages of print between these two half-schemes, as the book lies open, to take in both together.

We may thus finally compress the essentials of this whole paper into a simple formula–

TOWN | CITY
|
FOLK | POLITY
|
WORK | CULTURE
| | ^
PLACE | | | ART
—————–|—-|—-|———————- LORE | | | IMAGERY
v | |
LEAR | IDEA
|
LOVE | IDEAL
|
SCHOOL | CLOISTER

or most briefly–

| TOWN | CITY ^
| ——-+——— |
v SCHOOL | CLOISTER |

[Page: 91]–noting in every case the opposite direction of the arrows. The application of this formula to different types of town, such as those already indicated in the former instalment of this paper (Vol. I., p. 107) or in the present one, will not be found to present any insuperable difficulty. It must, however, be kept clearly in view that the city of each day and generation subsides or decays more or less completely into the mere town anew, as the cloister into the schools. The towns and cities of the world are thus classifiable in terms of their past development and present condition.

Summary

Condensing now this lengthy, yet compressed and abbreviated series of analyses into a single page of summary, we may briefly define the main aspects and departments of civics from the present point of view. First then, comes the study of civics as fundamentally (and ever anew) an orderly development–at once geographic, economic, and anthropologic in its nature–a survey of place, work, and folk–and these not merely or mainly as broken up into the fine dust of censuses and statistics, nor even of the three too separate sciences above named, but as a living unity, the human hive, the Town.

Corresponding to this objective and organic life we reorganise its fundamental subjective life. This is fundamentally, and ever partially, the record and reflex of the life of the hive, the Town: of all its general and particular environment and function, its family type and development; and however overlaid by imported culture or by decayed ideals, it is fundamentally expressed in local knowledge, in craft tradition, in kinship and its associated kindness, in habits and customs, and their developments up to morals and laws. Simple terms corresponding to place, work, and folk, are hard to find; say, however, till better be suggested, that in close relation to the maternal arms in which general social thought and its utmost pedagogic developments alike begin, it is place-lore, work-lear, and folk-love, which are the essentials of every [Page: 92] School.[11] That existing educational machineries may not adequately recognise these is not of course the question here.

[11] The use of _lore_ as primarily empirical, and derived from the senses, it is traditional; it is well therefore to restrict it to this, and to revive the old word _lear_, still understood in Scotland in these precise senses–intellectual, rational, yet traditional, occupational also.

These three terms, lore, lear, and love are thus well related to their respectively deepening levels of sense, intelligence and feeling; and their respective relation is thus more plain to the imagery, the theory, and the idealism above defined as the essentials of the Cloister. The psychology of the processes of poetic, philosophic and spiritual awakening and renewal is in these days being approached anew, both from the individual and social side, but cannot here be entered upon.

Finally and supremely arises the City proper–its individuality dependent upon the measure and form in which ideals are expressed and harmonised in social life and polity, ideas synthetised in culture, and beauty carried outwards from the study or chamber of the recluse into the world of art.

Practical conclusion

The investigation of the City thus tends towards the practice of citizenship. Thus social survey prepares for social service, as diagnosis towards treatment and hygiene; and these react fruitfully upon our knowledge and understanding anew. Beyond social observations, and the needed observatories for making them more adequately, we need social activities and the laboratories for preparing them, or at least the leavens of them; or, again, in happier phrase, at once simple and more synthetic, we need some shelter[12] into which to gather the best [Page: 93] seed of past flowerings and in which to raise and tend the seedlings of coming summers. We need definitely to acquire such a centre of survey and service in each and every city–in a word, a Civicentre for sociologist and citizen.

[12] Without forgetting the many institutions and workers in almost all departments of the field of civics, the rise of definite surveys and of scientific groupings like this Society, without ignoring also the many admirable workers and institutions of social endeavour, and their progressive integration into Social Unions, Institutes of Service, and the like, I may be permitted to press for the need of uniting both types, the scientific and the practical, into a single one–a civic museum and active centre in one. Of this type, my own Outlook Tower at Edinburgh is, so far as I am aware, the earliest beginning; and, despite its rudimentary condition, may thus serve to suggest a type of institution which will be found of service alike to the sociologist and the citizen.

M–THE HISTORIC CITY-COMPLEX

The criticism may have already arisen in the reader’s mind that the “Town” and “School” of our analysis are by no means so simple as we have assumed them. Our surveys of antique towns ever disclose the material survivals, at least the vestiges, of the cloister or the acropolis of the past, of its cathedral or its forum. The processes of our industries, in what is now their daily artisan routine, include, repeat, condense, what were yesterday or longer ago living inventions, each instinct with Promethean fire. The hackneyed ornament of our homes was once glowing with beauty, radiant or dark with symbolism. So it is for our everyday customs and institutions, and so for living languages; our own, perhaps, most of all. These, of course, are facts made familiar by investigators of all orders, from the scholar and antiquary of old, the historian and philologist of yesterday, to the geographer or the sociologist of our own time: witness Mr. Spencer’s masterly treatment of their main results. How, then, shall we correlate this process of all things growing old with the analysis of cities above attempted? In other words, how shall we interpret the course of their historic evolution, their renewed growth and decay, progress and degeneracy, their present condition, crowded with residues of the past, with those potentialities which our outline discloses? This is the more necessary since this fourfold analysis applies in principle to all human groupings from the simplest village to the Eternal City. To this, indeed, we have in principle already traced it, onwards from our primitive valley section with its humble hamlets, its fundamental occupations. Returning then to our main diagram, with its four-fold analysis of the City so soon as we have completed this, and [Page: 94] carried its progress up to the level of city life proper, we must next turn over the leaf and begin a new page, with place and work and folk once more. This simplest of acts expresses with graphic significance the very process of history; for in closing our diagram page its “Cloister” has been folded down on the “School,” our cathedral and forum, our “City” proper upon the “Town.” Thus it is that the ideals and the achievements of one day and generation and city are ever melting away, and passing out of sight of the next; so that to the joy or sorrow of the successors the new page seems well nigh bare, though ever there comes faintly through some image or at least blurred suggestion of the fading past. Hence each page of history is a palimpsest. Hence our modern town, even when yesterday but prairie, was no mere vacant site, but was at once enriched and encumbered by the surviving traditions of the past; so that even its new buildings are for the most part but vacant shells of past art, of which now only the student cares to trace the objective annals, much less penetrate to the inner history. So for the decayed Renaissance learning of our schools, for the most part so literally dead since the “Grammarian’s Funeral”; and so, too, for the unthinking routines, the dead customs and conventions, and largely too the laws and rituals of our urban lives. Hence, then, it is that for the arrest and the decay of cities we have no need to go for our examples to the ancient East. These processes, like those of individual senility and death, are going on everywhere day by day.

Upon the new page, then, it is but a complexer “Town” and “School” anew: we have no continuing City. This too commonly has existed at its best but for the rare generation which created it, or little longer; though its historic glories, like those of sunset and of after-glow, may long shed radiance and glamour upon its town, and linger in the world’s memory long after not only these have faded, but their very folk have vanished, their walls fallen, nay their very site been buried or forgotten. Upon all these degrees of dying, all these faint and fading steps between immortality and oblivion, we may arrange what we call our historic cities. Obviously in the [Page: 95] deeper and more living sense the city exists only in actualising itself; and thus to us it is that the ideal city lies ever in the future. Yet it is the very essence of this whole argument that an ideal city is latent in every town. Where shall we in these days find our cloistered retreats to think out such ideals as may be applicable in our time and circumstances: the needed kinetic ethics, the needed synthetic philosophy and science, the needed vision and imagery and expression of them all?

N–THE EVILS OF THE CITY

Disease, defect, vice and crime

I have spoken little of town evils, and much of town ideals, primarily for the reason that even to recognise, much less treat, the abnormal, we must know something of the normal course of evolution. Hence, the old and useful phrase by which physiology used to be known, that of “the institutes of medicine.” Sociology has thus to become “the institutes of citizenship.”

Often though philanthropists forget this, diagnosis should precede treatment. The evils of the city, by the very nature of our hypothesis, demand special survey, and this no less thoroughly than do the normal place and work and industry. It is only our most permanent intellectual impulse, that of seeking for unity, which excuses the cheap unitary explanations so often current; as, for instance, that social evils are mainly to be explained by intemperance, as for one school of reformers; by poverty or luxury, for a second and third; by Tammany or other form of party government, by socialism or by individualism for yet others; that they are due to dissent or to church, to ignorance or to the spread of science, and so on almost indefinitely–doubtless not without elements of truth in each!

Yet let me offer as yet another explanation of civic evils, this more general one–distinguished from the preceding by including them all and more–that not only is our “Town” in itself imperfect, but the other three elements we have been characterising as school, cloister and city, are yet more imperfect, since disordered, decayed, or undeveloped anew. It is because of each and all of these imperfect realisations of our civic life, that the evils of life sink down, or flame out, into these complex eruptions of social evils with which our human aggregations are as yet cursed.

Hence, to those who are struggling with disease and pain, with ignorance and defect, with vice, and with crime, but for the most part too separately, it is time to say that all these four evils are capable of being viewed together, and largely even treated together. They are not unrelated, but correspond each as the negative to that fourfold presentment of ideals we have hitherto been raising. To this ideal unity of healthy town, with its practical and scientific schools of all kinds, with its meditative cloister of ethical and social idealism, of unified science and philosophy, of imagination and drama, all culminating in the polity, culture, and art which make a city proper, we have here the corresponding defects in detail.

The evils of existing city life are thus largely reinterpreted; and if so more efficiently combated; since the poverty, squalor and ugliness of our cities, their disease and their intemperance, their ignorance, dulness and mental defect, their vice and crime are thus capable not only of separate treatment but of an increasingly unified civic hygiene, and this in the widest sense, material and moral, economic and idealist, utilitarian and artistic. Even the most earnest and capable workers towards civic betterment in these many fields may gain at once in hope and in efficiency as they see their special interests and tasks converging into the conception of the city as an organic unity, and this not fixed and settled, nor even in process of progress or degeneration from causes beyond our ken, but as an orderly development which we may aid towards higher perfection, geographic and cultural alike.

Our modern town is thus in a very real sense, one not hopeless, but as hopeful as may be, a veritable purgatory; that is a struggle of lower and higher idealisms, amid the respective expressions and outcomes of these. Indeed, in our own present [Page: 97] cities, as they have come to be, is not each of us ever finding his own Inferno, or it may be his Paradise? Does he not see the dark fate of some, the striving and rising hope of others, the redemption also?

The supreme poetic utterance of the mediaeval world is thus in great measure, as each thoughtful reader sees, an expression of impassioned citizenship and this at one of the golden moments of the long history of city life. This expression–this exiled citizen’s autobiographic thought-stream–is resumed at every level, from youthful home and local colour, from boyish love and hopes, from active citizenship and party struggle, to the transfiguration of all these. Hence these mystic visions, and these world ambitions, temporal and spiritual; hence this rise from cloistered faith and philosophy into many-sided culture; hence the transformation of all these through intensest symbol-visions into enduring song.

Am I thus suggesting the _Divina Comedia_ as a guide-book to cities? Without doubt, though not necessarily for beginners. Yet who can see Florence without this, though we may pack below it Baedeker and Murray? Or who, that can really read, can open a volume of Mr. Booth’s severely statistical Survey of London, with all its studious reserve, its scientific repression, without seeing between its lines the Dantean circles; happy if he can sometimes read them upward as well as down?

O–A CIVIC SYMBOL AND ITS MEANING

But such books of the city, whether of the new and observant type, from Baedeker to Booth, or of the old and interpretative Dantean one, are too vast and varied to keep open before us. Even the preceding open page of diagram is complex enough with its twofold, indeed four-fold city; and we are called back to our daily work in the first of these divisions, that of the everyday town. Since its subjective aspects of school and cloister may fade from memory, its higher aspect also, that of city proper, how can we retain this fourfold [Page: 98] analysis, and how test if it be true? Take then one final illustration; this time no mere logical skeleton, however simple or graphic, but an image more easily retained, because a concrete and artistic one, and moreover in terms of that form of life-labour and thought-notation–that of current coin–which, in our day especially, dominates this vastest of cities; and hence inherits for the region of its home and centre–“the Bank” which has so thoroughly taken precedence of the town-house and cathedral, of the fortress and palace–the honoured name of “City.” The coinages of each time and place combine concrete and social use with statements of historic facts; and they add to both of these a wealth of emblematic suggestions: but that is to say, they express not only their town, and something of its _school_, but much of its thought also, its _cloister_ in my present terminology.

So before me lies an old “bawbee” of my own home city. On one side stands the hammerman at his anvil, below him the motto of his guild, “_Non marte sed arte_.” Here then the industrial “Town” and its “School” express themselves plainly enough, and precisely as they have been above defined. But on the other side spreads the imperial double eagle; since Perth _(Bertha aurea)_ had been the northmost of all Rome’s provincial capitals, her re-named “Victoria” accordingly, as the mediaeval herald must proudly have remembered, so strengthened his associations with the Holy Roman Empire with something of that vague and shadowy historic dignity which the Scot was wont to value so much, and vaunt so high. On the eagle’s breast is a shield, tressured like the royal standard, since Perth was the national capital until the “King’s Tragedy” of 1457; but instead of the ruddy lion the shield bears the lamb with the banner of St. John, the city’s saint. This side, too, has its motto, and one befitting an old capital of King and Commons, both in continual strife with the feudal nobles, “_Pro Rege, Lege, et Grege_.” Here then, plain upon this apparent arbitrarily levised trifle, this petty provincial money-token, this poor bawbee, that is, this coin not only of the very humblest order, but proverbially sordid at that, we find clearly set down, long generations ago, the whole [Page:99] four-fold analysis and synthesis of civic life we have been above labouring for. For what makes the industrial Town, what can better keep it than strenuous industry at its anvil? How better express its craft school, its local style and skill, its reaction too upon the town’s life in peace and war, than by this Hal o’ the Wynd by his forge? Nay, what better symbol than this hammer, this primitive tool and ever typical one, of the peaceful education of experience, form Prometheus to Kelvin, of the warlike, from Thor to modern cannon-forge? Turning now from Town and School to Cloister, to the life of secluded peace and meditation–from which, however, the practical issues of life are ever renewed–what plainer symbol, yet what more historic or more mystic one can we ask than this of the lamb with the banner? While of the contrasted yet complemental civic life of fullest, broadest action, what expression like the Roman eagle–the very eyes of keenness, and the spreading wings of power?

So rarely perfect then is this civic symbol, that I must not omit to mention that it has only come to my notice since the body of this paper, with its four-fold analysis of cities as above outlined, was essentially finished. Since it thus has not in any particular suggested the treatment of cities here advocated, it is the more interesting and encouraging as a confirmation of it. It is also to my mind plain that in this, as in many other of our apparent “advances in science,” and doubtless those in social studies particularly, we are but learning to think things anew, long after our forefathers have lived them, even expressed them–and these in their ways no less clear and popular than can ever be ours. That we may also again live them is once more curiously expressed by the same symbol; for its re-appearance is due to its having been appropriately revived, in a fitting art form, that of the commemorative and prize medal of the local arts and crafts exhibition, held in the new Public Library, under civic auspices. Little scrutiny of this last sentence will be needed to see the four-fold completeness of the civic event which it describes.

For just as we have seen on the old coin the hammerman [Page: 100] and his motto answer to the town and school; so now on its reissue to the renascent local arts and crafts, with their commemoration in this library. And as the greater motto, that of widest policy, corresponds to the cloister of reflection and resolve, so we note that this new impulse to civic betterment is associated with the new library–no mere school-house of memory, but also the open cloister of our day. Finally, note that this impulse is no longer merely one of aesthetic purpose, of “art for art’s sake,” nor its execution that of a cultured minority merely; it announces a re-union of this culture and art with the civic polity. What fitter occasion, then, for the striking of a medal, than this renewal of civic life, with municipal organisation and polity, art and culture, renascent in unison. That such events are nowadays far from exceptional is so true that we are in danger of losing sight of their significance. Yet it is amid such city developments that the future Pericles must arise.

We thus see that our analysis is no mere structural one, made post-mortem from civic history; but that it applies to the modern functioning of everyday life in an everyday city, so soon as this becomes touched anew towards cultural issues. Furthermore, it is thus plain that civic life not only has long ago anticipated and embodied our theories of it, but once more outruns them, expressing them far better than in words–in life and practice. In this way the reader who may most resent these unfamiliar methods of exposition, alternately by abstract diagram or concrete illustration–which may seem to him too remote from ordinary life and experience, perhaps too trivial–may now test the present theory of the city, or amend it, by means of the ample illustrations of the processes and results of social life which are provided by his daily newspaper, and these on well-nigh all its fields and levels.

Note finally that it is the eagle and lamb of temporal and spiritual idealism that form the “head” of this coin, the craftsman and anvil but the modest “tail.” The application is obvious.

Thus even numismatics revives from amid the fossil [Page: 100] sciences. For from this to our own common coinage, or notably to that of France, America, Switzerland, etc., the transition is easy, and still better to that of the noblest civic past, both classic and mediaeval. Without pursuing this further here my present point is gained, if we see, even in the everyday local details of work and people, the enduring stamp, the inextinguishable promise, of the flowering of our everyday industries and schools into worthier ideals than they at present express, and of the fruition of these in turn upon nobler heights of life and practice. It expresses the essential truth of the popular view of the city; that in terms of the formula–People … Affairs … Places–above referred to (page 69). It also explains the persistent vitality of this view, despite its frequent crudity, and lack of order in detail, in face of the more scientific treatment here at first employed, that in the elementary geographic order–Place … Work … People. For though this objective order be fundamental, it is the complementary subjective evolution which throughout history has ever become supreme; so that our scheme must combine the outward geographic presentment with the inward psychological one. This may be graphically expressed by changing the order of presentment from that used hitherto:–

Town | City City | Town
——————– to ———————- School | Cloister Cloister | School

P–FORECAST OF CITY DEVELOPMENT. SPECIAL AND GENERAL

The dual and four-fold development of the city, as above sketched, is by no means far advanced in most of our present towns or cities, which have obviously but scanty expression of the ideas shadowed forth for the modern equivalents of cloister and cathedral, of academe and acropolis. But this is to say that such towns, however large, populous and rich according to conventional economic standards, are to that extent small and poor, indeed too often little better than cities by courtesy. Yet their further development, upon this [Page: 102] four-fold view of civic evolution, though in principle the same for each and all, has always been, and let us hope may always be, in large measure an individual (because regional) one. For if each human individuality be unique, how much more must that of every city?

In one concrete case, that of Dunfermline, I have already submitted definite suggestions towards the realisation of the civic Utopia, and even architectural designs towards its execution,[13] so that these may at any rate suffice to show how local study and adaptive design are needed for each individual city, indeed for every point of it. It is thus, and thus only, that we can hope to have a city development truly evolutionary, that is, one utilising the local features, advantages, and possibilities of place, occupation, and people. Of course, it is needful to supplement these by the example of other cities; but it is no less needful to avoid weighting down the local life with replicas of institutions, however excellent elsewhere, if really irregional here. With the re-awakening of regional life in our various centres, and of some comprehension of its conditions among our rulers, they will cease to establish, say, a school of mines in Piccadilly, or again one of engineering and the like in South Kensington. The magistrates of Edinburgh have long abandoned their old attempt to plant mulberries and naturalise silk culture upon their wind-swept Calton Hill; albeit this was a comparatively rational endeavour, since a population of Huguenot refugee silk weavers had actually come upon their hands.

[13] Cf. the writer’s “City Development,” Edinburgh and Westminster, 1904.

Similarly, it is plain that we must develop Oxford as Oxford, Edinburgh as Edinburgh, and so on with all other cities, great or small–York or Winchester, Westminster or London. And so with Chelsea or Hampstead, with Woolwich or Battersea. Has not the last of these grown from a mere outlying vestry, like so many others, into a centre of genuine vitality and interior progress, indeed of ever-widening interest and example; and all this in half a generation, apparently through the sagacious leadership–say, rather the devoted, the [Page: 103] impassioned citizenship–of a single man? And does not his popular park at times come near giving us a vital indication of the needed modern analogue of cathedral and forum? Civic development is thus no mere external matter, either of “Haussmannising” its streets, or of machine-educating its people; the true progress of the city and its citizenship must alike grow and flower from within albeit alive and open to every truly fertilising impulse from without.

Yet since national interests, international industry, commerce, science, and therefore progress are nowadays and increasingly so largely one, may we not in conclusion foresee something at least of the great lines of development which are common to cities, and generalise these as we are accustomed to do in history? Witness the Classical, Mediaeval, and Renaissance types to which historic cities preponderatingly belong, and within which we group their varied individualities, as after all of comparative detail.

Here then it is time to recall the presentment of ancient, recent and contemporary evolution already outlined in the part of this paper previously read (Vol. I, p. 109), dealing with the historic survey of cities. We have now to face the question, then postponed, indeed left in interrogation-marks–that of seeking not indeed sharply to define the future order of things, yet in some measure to discern such elements of progress as may be already incipient in the existing order, if not yet largely manifest there. Such elements may be reasonably expected to grow in the near future, perhaps increasingly, and whatever be their rate of growth are surely worthy of our attention.

Contemporary science, with its retrospective inquiries into origins in the past, its everyday observation of the present, is apt practically to overlook that the highest criterion and achievement of science is not to decipher the past, nor record the present, not even to interpret both. It is to foresee: only thus can it subserve action, of which the present task ever lies towards the future, since it is for this that we have to provide. Why then should not Comte’s famous aphorism–“_Voir pour prevoir, prevoir pour pourvoir_,” become applicable in our civic studies no less than in the general social and political fields to [Page: 104] which he applied it? In navigation or engineering, in agriculture or hygiene, prevision and provision alike are ever increasing; yet these are no mere combinations of the preliminary sciences and the fundamental occupations, but obviously contain very large social elements.

It is proverbially safe to prophesy when one knows; and it is but this safe prediction which we make every day of child or bud, where we can hardly fail to see the growing man, the coming flower. Yet do not most people practically forget that even now, in mid-winter, next summer’s leaves are already waiting, nay, that they were conceived nine months ago? That they thus grow in small, commonly unnoticed beginnings, and lie in bud for a period twice as long as the summer of their adult and manifest life, is yet a fact, and one to which the social analogies are many and worth considering.

While recognising, then, the immense importance of the historic element of our heritage, renaissance and mediaeval, classic and earlier; recognising also the predominance of contemporary forces and ideas, industrial and liberal, imperial and bureaucratic, financial and journalistic, can we not seek also, hidden under all these leaves, for those of the still-but-developing bud, which next season must be so much more important than they are to day? It is a commonplace, yet mainly of educational meetings, to note that the next generation is now at school; but how seldom do we recognise its pioneers, albeit already among our own contemporaries? At any rate we may see here and there that their leaven is already at work.

In this respect, cities greatly differ–one is far more initiative than another. In the previous paper (vol. I, p. 109), we saw how individuals, edifices, institutions, might represent all past phases; these, therefore, often predominate in different cities sufficiently to give its essential stamp. Why then should we not make a further survey and seek to see something of the cities of the future; though we may have to look for these in quarters where at first sight there may seem as yet scanty promise of flower?

[Page: 105] To recall an instance employed above, probably every member of this Society is old enough to remember incredulous questionings of whether any good thing could come out of Battersea. Again, how few, even in America, much less than in Europe, a few years ago, forsaw the rapid growth of those culture-elements in St. Louis, of which the recent World-Exposition will not have been the only outcome?

Only a few years earlier, it was Chicago which, for New England no less than for the Old World, seemed but the byword of a hopelessly materialised community. So Birmingham or Glasgow has won its present high position among cities in comparatively recent times; so it may now be the turn of older cities, once far more eminent, like Newcastle or Dundee, to overtake and in turn, perhaps, outstrip them. But all this is still too general and needs further definition; let us attempt this, therefore, somewhat more fully, in the concrete case of Glasgow.

Q–GLASGOW AS TYPICAL OF CIVIC TRANSITION–FROM “PALEOTECHNIC” TO “NEOTECHNIC”

My own appreciation of the significance of Glasgow was first really awakened over twenty years ago by William Morris, who in his vivid way pointed out to me how, despite the traditional culture–superiority of Edinburgh, Glasgow was not only the Scottish capital, but, in his view, in real progressiveness the leading and initiative city of the whole United Kingdom. And this for him was not merely or mainly in its municipal enterprise, then merely in its infancy–although he expressed this development in the phrase “In London, people talked socialism without living it; but in Glasgow, they were socialists without knowing it!” Despite all the ugliness which had so repelled Ruskin, the squalor which moved Matthew Arnold to the fiercest scorn in all his writings, Morris’s appreciation arose from his craftsman’s knowledge and respect for supreme craftsmanship. The great ships building upon the Clyde were for him “the greatest achievement of [Page: 106] humanity since the days of the cathedral-builders,” nay, for him actually surpassing these, since calling forth an even more complex combination and “co-operation of all the material arts and sciences” into a mighty and organic whole; and correspondingly of all their respective workers also, this being for him of the very essence of his social ideal.

For these reasons he insisted, to my then surprise that the social reorganisation he then so ardently hoped for “was coming faster upon the Clyde than upon the Thames”: he explained as for him the one main reason for his then discouragement as to the progress of London that there East and West, North and South, are not only too remote each from the other, but in their occupations all much too specialised–there to finance, there to manufactures, or here to leisure, and so on; while on the Clyde industrial organisation and social progress could not but develop together, through the very nature of the essential and working unity of the ship.

Since Morris’s day, a local art movement, of which he knew little, has risen to eminence, a foreign critic would say to pre-eminence, in this country at least. Since Ruskin’s savage response to a Glasgow invitation to lecture–“first burn your city, and cleanse your river,”–a new generation of architects and hygienists have not a little transformed the one, and vigorous measures have been taken towards the purification of the other. That the city and university pre-eminently associated with the invention of the steam-engine, and consequently with the advent of the industrial revolution throughout the world, should, a century later, have produced a scarcely less pre-eminent leader of applied science towards the command of electricity is thus no isolated coincidence. And as political economy, which is ever the theory corresponding to our phase of industrial practice, and there some of its foremost pioneers, and later its classical exponent, Adam Smith himself, so once more there are signs at least of a corresponding wave of theoretic progress. Students of primitive civilisation and industry have now long familiarised us with their reinterpretation of what was long known as the stone age, into two very distinct [Page: 107] periods, the earlier characterised by few and rough implements, roughly used by a rude people, the second by more varied tools, of better shape, and finer edge, often of exquisite material and polish. We know that these were wielded more skilfully, by a people of higher type, better bred and better nourished; and that these, albeit of less hunting and militant life, but of pacific agricultural skill, prevailed in every way in the struggle for existence; thanks thus not only to more advanced arts, but probably above all to the higher status of woman. This distinction of Paleolithic and Neolithic ages and men, has long passed into the terminology of sociological science, and even into current speech: is it too much then, similarly, to focus the largely analogous progress which is so observable in what we have been wont to generalise too crudely as the modern Industrial Age? All are agreed that the discoveries and inventions of this extraordinary period of history constitute an epoch of material advance only paralleled, if at all, in magnitude and significance by those of prehistory with its shadowy Promethean figures. Our own advance from a lower industrial civilisation towards a higher thus no less demands definite characterisation, and this may be broadly expressed as from an earlier or _Paleotechnic_ phase, towards a later or more advanced _Neotechnic_ one. If definition be needed, this may be broadly given as from a comparatively crude and wasteful technic age, characterised by coal, steam, and cheap machine products, and a corresponding _quantitative_ ideal of “progress of wealth and population”–towards a finer civilisation, characterised by the wider command, yet greater economy of natural energies, by the predominance of electricity, and by the increasing victory of an ideal of qualitative progress, expressed in terms of skill and art, of hygiene and education, of social polity, etc.

The Neotechnic phase, though itself as yet far from completely replacing the paleotechnic order which is still quantitatively predominant in most of our cities, begins itself to show signs of a higher stage of progress, as in the co-ordination of the many industries required for the building of a ship, or in the yet more recent developments which begin to renew for us the conception of the worthy construction of a city. As [Page: 108] the former period may be characterised by the predominance of the relatively unskilled workman and of the skilled, so this next incipient age by the development of the chief workman proper, the literal _architectos_ or architect; and by his companion the rustic improver, gardener and forester, farmer, irrigator, and their correspondingly evolving types of civil engineer.

To this phase then the term _Geotechnic_ may fairly be applied. Into its corresponding theoretic and ideal developments we need not here enter, beyond noting that these are similarly of synthetic character; on the concrete side the sciences unifying as geography, and on their more abstract side as the classification and philosophy of the sciences,–while both abstract and concrete movements of thought are becoming more and more thoroughly evolutionary in character.

But evolutionary theories, especially as they rise towards comprehensiveness, cannot permanently content themselves with origins, or with classifications merely, nor with concentrating on nature rather than on man. Nature furnishes after all but the stage for evolution in its highest terms; of this man himself is the hero; so that thus our Geotechnic phase, Synthetic age (call it what we will) in its turn gives birth to a further advance–that concerned with human evolution, above all subordinating all things to him; whereas in all these preceding industrial phases, even if decreasingly, “things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” This age, now definitely evolutionist in policy, as the geotechnic was in theory and in environment we may term the _Eugenic_. For its theory, still less advanced, the term _Eupsychic_ may complete our proposed nomenclature.

Thus then our conception of the opening future may be increasingly defined, since all these apparently predicted phases are already incipient among us, and are thus really matters of observed fact, of social embryology let us say; in short, of city development.

In summary, then, the diagram of the former instalment of this paper (vol. 1, p. 109)

ANCIENT ||
Primitive | Matriarchal | Patriarchal ||

RECENT ||
Greek and Roman | Mediaeval | Renaissance ||

CONTEMPORARY ||
Revolution | Empire | Finance ||

INCIPIENT
? ? ?

[Page: 109] has thus its interrogations filled up. Omitting the left-hand half, that generalised as Ancient and Recent in the above diagram, so as to give more space to the Contemporary and Incipient phases, these now stand as follows:–

CONTEMPORARY || INCIPIENT Revolution | Revolution | Empire ||Neotechnic | Geotechnic | Eugenic

To elaborate this farther would, of course, exceed my present limits; but I may be permitted to say that long use of this schematic outline, especially of course in more developed forms, has satisfied me of its usefulness alike in the study of current events and in the practical work of education and city betterment. I venture then to recommend it to others as worth trial.

R–A PRACTICAL PROPOSAL–A CIVIC EXHIBITION

How shall we more fully correlate our theoretic civics, i.e., our observations of cities interpreted as above, with our moral ideas and our practical policy–i.e., our Applied Civics. Our ideals have to be selected, our ideas defined, our plans matured; and the whole of these applied; that is realised, in polity, in culture, and in art. But if this be indeed the due correlation of civic survey and civic service, how may we now best promote the diffusion and the advancement of both? At this stage therefore, I venture to submit to the Society a practical proposal for its consideration and discussion; and if approved, I would fain hope for its recommendation to towns and cities, to organisations and to the public likely to be interested.

Here then is my proposal. Is not the time ripe for bringing together the movements of Civics and Eugenics, now here and indeed everywhere plainly nascent, and of setting these before the public of this country in some such large and concrete ways, as indeed, in the latter subject at least, have been so strongly desiderated by Mr. Galton? As regards Civics, such have been afforded to America during the summer of 1904 by the Municipal Section of the St. Louis Exhibition; in [Page: 110] Dresden also, at the recent Towns Exhibition; and by kindred Exhibitions and Congresses in Paris and elsewhere.

All these have taken form since the Paris Exposition of 1900, with its important section of social economy and its many relevant special congresses. Among these may be specially mentioned here as of popular interest, and civic stimulus, the _Congres de L’Art Public_; the more since this also held an important Exhibition, to which many Continental cities sent instructive exhibits.

Other exhibitions might be mentioned; so that the fact appears that in well-nigh every important and progressive country, save our own, the great questions of civics have already been fully opened, and vividly brought before their public, by these great contemporary museums with their associated congresses.

With our present Chairman, the Rt. Hon. Charles Booth, with Canon Barnett, Mr. Horsfall, and so many other eminent civic workers among us; with our committee and its most organising of secretaries, might not a real impulse be given in this way by this Society towards civic education and action?

Let me furthermore recall the two facts; first, that in every important exhibition which has been held in this country or abroad, no exhibits have been more instructive and more popular than have been (1) the picturesque reconstructions of ancient cities, and the presentment of their city life, and (2) the corresponding surveys of the present conditions of town life, and of the resources and means of bettering them.

Even as a show then, I venture to submit that such a “Towneries” might readily be arranged to excel in interest, and surpass in usefulness, the excellent “Fisheries,” “Healtheries”, and other successful exhibitions in the record and recent memory of London. The advantages of such an exhibition are indeed too numerous for even an outline here; but they may be easily thought out more and more fully. Indeed, I purposely abstain for the present from more concrete suggestion; for the discussion of its elements, methods, plans, and scale will be found to raise the whole range of civic questions, and to set these in freshening lights.

[Page: 111] At this time of social transition, when we all more or less feel the melting away of old divisions and parties, of old barriers of sects and schools, and the emergence of new possibilities, the continual appearance of new groupings of thought and action, such a Civic Exhibition would surely be specially valuable. In the interest, then, of the incipient renascence of civic progress, I plead for a Civic Exhibition.[14]

[14] Since the preceding paper was read, it is encouraging to note the practical beginnings of a movement towards a civic exhibition, appropriately arising, like so many other valuable contributions to civic betterment, from Toynbee Hall. The Cottages Exhibition initiated by Mr. St. Loe Strachey at Garden City, and of course also that admirable scheme itself, must also be mentioned as importance forces in the directions of progress and propaganda advocated above.

Of such an exhibition, the very catalogue would be in principle that _Encyclopaedia Civica_, into which, in the previous instalment of this paper (vol. I, p. 118) I have sought to group the literature of civics. We should thus pass before us, in artistic expression, and therefore in universal appeal, the historic drama of the great civic past, the mingled present, the phantasmagoria and the tragi comedy of both of these. We should then know more of the ideals potential for the future, and, it may be, help onward some of the Eutopias which are already struggling towards birth.

DISCUSSION

The Chairman (THE RT. HON. CHARLES BOOTH) said:

I feel always the inspiring character of Professor Geddes’ addresses. He seems to widen and deepen the point of view, and to widen and deepen one’s own ideas, and enables us to hold them more firmly and better than one can do without the aid of the kind of insight Professor Geddes has given into the methods of his own mind. I believe that we all hold our conceptions by some sort of tenure. I am afraid I hold mine by columns and statistics much underlined–a horrible prosaic sort of arrangement on ruled paper. I remember a lady of my acquaintance who had a place for everything. The discovery of America was in the left-hand corner; the Papacy was in the middle; and for everything she had some local habitation in an imaginary world. Professor Geddes is far more ingenious than that, and it is most interesting and instructive and helpful to follow these charming diagrams which spring evidently from the method he himself uses in holding and forming his conceptions. That it is of the utmost value to have large conceptions there can be no doubt–large conceptions both in time and place, large conceptions of all those various ideas to which he has called our attention. By some means or other we have to have them; and having got them, every individual, single fact has redoubled value. We put it in its place. So I hope that in our discussion, while we may develop each in his own way, the mental methods we pursue, we may bring forward anything that strikes us as germane, as a practical point of application to the life of the world, and especially anything having an application to the life of London. I would make my contribution to that with regard to a scheme that has been explained to me by its originator, Mrs. Barnett, the wife of Canon Barnett of Toynbee Hall. The idea concerns an open [Page: 113] space which has recently been secured in Hampstead. It is known to you all that a certain piece of ground belonging to the trustees of Eton College has been secured, which extends the open space of Hampstead Heath in such a way as to protect a great amount of beauty. The further proposal is to acquire an estate surrounding that open space which has now been secured for ever to the people, and to use this extension to make what is called a “garden suburb.” It is a following out of the “garden-city” idea which is seizing hold of all our minds, and it seems to me an exceedingly practical adaptation of that idea. Where it comes in, in connection with the address we have just heard, is that the root idea is that it shall bring together all the good elements of civic life. It is not to be for one class, or one idea, but for all classes, and all ideas–a mixed population with all its needs thought for and provided for; and above everything, the beauty of those fields and those hills is not to be sacrificed, but to be used for the good of the suburb and the good of London. I hope that out of it will come an example that will be followed. That is a little contribution I wish to make to the discussion to-day, and if I can interest any one here in forwarding it, I shall be exceedingly glad.

MR. SWINNY said:

Towards the close of his lecture, Professor Geddes remarked that the cities of America inherited a great part of their civilisation from Greece and Rome and the Europe of the Middle Age. I believe that thought will lead us to consider the point whether this geographical survey should precede or follow a general historical survey. Now, if we consider that a river valley in England, with the towns in that valley,