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, are part of the English nation, and that the English nation has shared in the general historical evolution of Western Europe, it would seem that the first simplification the question allows of is: What is there in the historical development of that city that is common to the whole of Western Europe, and what is peculiar to its position as an English city? And the second simplification that the problem allows of is to consider what part of the evolution of a particular city is due to its peculiar position in that river valley? So that it seems necessary first to get a general idea of the historical evolution of England and the West; and then you can proceed to consider what is due to the part played by the city in that evolution. Thus you have to consider not so much the city as a result of its immediate environment, but the effect of its environment in modifying the general course of civilisation as it affected that city.

DR. J.L. TAYLER,

[Page: 114] referring to Professor Geddes' remarks on the working craftsman and the thinking craftsman, said he believed that in a country like England, where the prevailing tendencies of thought and action were of an essentially practical nature, many people who now felt contempt for higher mental ideals would alter their views, if this idea of the causal relationship between thinkers and workers could be driven home. If business men and women could be made to realise that in the higher regions of pure science there were always to be found some thinkers who belonged to the same craft or trade as they themselves, they would naturally tend to rely on these thinkers when dealing with problems that necessitate a wide mental outlook.

Moreover, the thought that students of great mental powers studied the objects with which working craftsmen were in daily contact, could not fail to deepen, refine and purify their more practical and, in some respects, grosser aims; while the knowledge that every science-study had an industrial as well as a scientific aspect would make the thinking craftsmen more alive to the needs of everyday existence.

Such conceptions, if spread through all classes of our community, would inevitably change the feeling of distrust of learning into one of healthful enthusiasm, and give in addition a unity and direction to our various life pursuits which might in time generate a true modern national spirit; for it is precisely this divorce of mental and physical, of theoretical and practical, class and individual effort—which such a thinking and working craft theory would rectify—that destroys our efficiency by creating an unreal chasm between refined and unrefined, learned and unlearned, where there should be only a progressive evolution from the lower to the higher, from the immediate practical to the ultimate ideal.

THE REV. DR. AVELING said:

There was one point that the lecturer made which, I think, might be a fit and fruitful subject for discussion. He said that we were the product of the city. To a great extent that is undoubtedly true; but on the other hand, he advocated an improvement in the conditions of environment, to be brought about by our own endeavours. Therefore, the city can be shaped and made by us. What, then, is the exact value to be given to the seemingly contradictory doctrines that the individual is the product of the city and also that the city is the product of the citizen? The establishing of some fixed relation between—or the adjusting of the relations of—these two causes of social progress would be, I think, interesting to the philosopher, and useful to the economist. The problem is [Page: 115] without doubt a difficult one, but its solution would be of great value. I do not venture to offer any answer to the question I raise—I merely state it.

MR. A.W. STILL said:

We have been passing through a period in which the city has created a type of man so wholly absorbed in the promotion of his own individual interests that he tends almost entirely to forget the social obligations which ought to make the greatest appeal to him. We may take some hope from what Professor Geddes has said, that the time is coming when we shall bring the force of our own characters to bear on our environment, and endeavour to break away from conditions which have made us the slaves of environment. I know the lovely little garden city of Bourneville intimately, and some of the experiments in other quarters. But in the common expansion of cities, I have seen that as the people get away from one set of slums, they are creating new areas which will become as degraded and abominable as those which are left behind. It has always seemed to me that there is room for good work by some committee, or some body of men, who would be voluntary guardians of the city's well-being, who would make it their business to acquire all that knowledge which Professor Geddes has just put before us in terms so enchanting, and would use all the ability that they possess in order to lead the minds of the community towards the cultivation of the best and highest ideals in civic life. I do not think it need be regarded as impossible that, from an association of this kind, such a movement as I have mentioned should spring. I conceive the possibility of each group developing into a trust, capable of acting in the interests of the city in years to come, exercising a mighty influence, being relied upon for guidance, and administering great funds for the common good. If we could get in each of our populous centres a dozen thoroughly intelligent broad-minded men, capable of watching all the streams of tendency—all the developments of civic life, bringing their judgment to bear on its progress, and urging the public to move in the right direction, a great service might be rendered. At least once a year, these little groups of men might meet together at some general conference, and, by the exchange of their opinions and by the mutual helpfulness of intellectual intercourse, raise up and perfect civic ideals which would be a boon to this country. We suffer at present, I think, from the too great particularisation of our efforts. We get one man devoting himself exclusively to a blind asylum, another seeming to take no interest in anything but a deaf-and-dumb institute or the like, and yet another devoting himself to charity organisation. It is all excellent work, but the difficulty is to get broad, comprehensive views taken of the common good. To reduce poverty and to check physical degeneracy, there must be an effort continuously made to [Page: 116] raise the tone of the environment in which we live. The home and the city need to be made wholesome and beautiful, and the people need to be encouraged to enlarge their minds by contact with nature, and by the study of all that is elevating and that increases the sum of social responsibility.

MR. E.S. WEYMOUTH said:

He found it somewhat difficult to see what was to be the practical outcome of civics if studied in the way proposed. Would Professor Geddes consider it the duty of any Londoner, who wished to study sociology practically, to map out London, and also the surrounding districts, with special reference to the Thames River Basin, as appeared to be suggested in both Professor Geddes' papers? Looking at civics in its practical or ethical aspect, he was bound to confess that, though he had acquired a tolerable knowledge of the geography of the Thames Basin, he did not feel it helped him materially towards becoming a better citizen of London. Would Professor Geddes wish them to study, first, London with its wealth side by side with its squalor and filth, and then proceed to study another large town, where the same phenomena presented themselves? What gain would there be in that proportionate to the labour entailed? In his own case, so disheartened had he felt by observing that all their efforts, public and private, for the improvement of their civic conditions seemed to end in raising considerably the rents of the ground landlords of London, while leaving the bulk of the population engaged in a hard struggle for their existence, that he had for years past found it difficult to take much interest in municipal affairs, so long as the rates and taxes were—as it seemed to him—put upon the wrong shoulders. And for the study of civics, he had preferred to turn to those cities where efforts were being made to establish communal life on what seemed to him juster conditions. In 1897, he was struck with the title of an article in the "Daily Telegraph." It was headed, "The Land of Beauty, Society without Poverty, Life without Care." He found the article was a description of Durban in Natal. The writer attributed the prosperity of this town to the fact that the suburbs were kept in the hands of the community, instead of being handed over to private owners who would absorb all the unearned increment. Even if this eulogium betrayed exaggeration still a student of civics might feel that the economic conditions of that town were worth studying. Similarly, in New Zealand, the adoption in 1891 of the tax on land values brought prosperity to the towns, and changed the tide of emigration from New Zealand into immigration. Again, at home they had Bourneville, Port Sunlight, and that most interesting of all present-day experiments in this country, the Garden City, all of these being founded by men with ideals. He could not help feeling [Page: 117] that a student of civics, possessed of such a fair working knowledge of the city he lived in as most of them might reasonably lay claim to, would make more real progress by studying the success or failure of social experiments, than by entering on the very formidable task that seemed to be set before them by Professor Geddes. However, when they left abstract civics, as they had it portrayed to them in these papers, and turned to the architectural or the historical side of concrete civics, there should be no better guide than Professor Geddes, whose labours in Edinburgh, and whose projected schemes for the improvement of Dunfermline, were becoming widely known.

MR. TOMKINS (of the London Trades Council) said:

If before any person was allowed to serve on our different public bodies, he should be required to attend a course of lectures such as those given by Professor Geddes on civics, that would surely be a means of developing his social interests, and would tend to eliminate that self-interest which too often actuated public men. There was nothing more difficult than for workmen to-day to be able to take larger views. The workman's whole business was now so different from what is was in the days of the arts and crafts guilds of the Middle Ages; they now found him ground down into some little division of industry, and it was quite impossible for him to work in his own way. Thus he got narrow-minded, because concentrated on some minor process. He was kept at work with his nose to the mill the whole time, and it became too exhausting for him to try and take these larger views of life. He often thought of the amount of talent and energy and practical beauty which was wasted in our workshops to-day. Referring to the Garden Cities of this country and the United States, Mr. Tomkins said the idea of getting great Trusts to use their money in a social spirit, and not merely to get the workers tied to their mills, was really something which opened out a vista of grand possibilities in the future; but if any movement was to be successful it would be necessary to teach the great masses of workers, and to create a real sound social public opinion amongst them.

PROFESSOR GEDDES' reply

Professor Geddes, in replying to the discussion, said he entirely agreed with the point made by Mr. Swinny, and he should just like to correct what he had said in his lecture by reference to what he meant by a civic museum. In Edinburgh, he had in his museum a large room, with a geographical model [Page: 118] of the old town with its hill-fort, and so on; and he hung round this maps and diagrams of historical and geographical details. On the opposite side of the room, he had a symbol of the market-cross, which stood for the centre of its municipal life, of its ideals and independence of environment. Around it was grouped what represented the other side of the city; and here he might answer another point, and say that they could never settle the great philosophical controversy of determinism and free-will. They would always incline when young to the novel of circumstance, and later, to the novel of character, but they should always feel that life was a game of individual skill with interfering circumstances. These diagrams of his were only the page split. On the one side, he meant to push to the extreme the idea that the place makes us, and on the other side, that we make the place. By what process do men struggle towards the selection of their ideals? They find themselves within the grasp of their environment, their whole heritage of culture, of good and ill, the whole tradition of the past; but they must select certain elements of these—the elements that seem to them good, and so they might escape from the manner of the city. Pointing to a drawing of the old Scotch bawbee, Professor Geddes said it was not a very dignified symbol of the coinage of the world, but let them mark how it had on the one side the hammerman at his work, with his motto "Beat deus artem," and, on the other side, a larger legend, with the eagle of the empire and the lamb of Saint John.

To return to his civic museum: the room below the one he had described was the larger museum for Scotland, and in the room below that, again, the museum for England, Ireland and America, the whole English-speaking world—not the Empire only. And the whole stood on a museum and library representing that larger evolution of the occidental civilisation which showed them they were merely children of the past. Professor Geddes pleaded for museums in which every city displayed its own past and present, but related itself to the whole of Europe and the whole occident.

One or two practical questions of great importance had [Page: 119] been raised; but, with all respect, he submitted that they could consider what was practical and practicable without requiring to go into the question of taxing land. That was a matter of political opinion. It was as if they were discussing the geology of coal, which they could do, without reference to coal royalties. Mr. Weymouth was with them on the subject of preserving old buildings; and he thought there was a great deal to be learned, if Mr. Weymouth would descend the valley of the Thames once more. It was of great importance if he found a great city at the tidal limit. Going down the Thames and the Tay, they would find, at the last ford of one, the old Abbey of Westminster, and at the last ford of the other, the old Abbey of Scoon. The kings of England and Scotland were crowned there because these were the most important places—a point of great historic interest. As a matter of practical interest, he might mention that Scoon and Westminster alike passed out of supreme importance when bridges were built across the river below; and he would next point out how just as Perth became of subordinate importance when the great Tay Bridge was built, so it became a tremendously important question to London, as it might in turn be much affected by the making of a great and a new bridge much further down the stream. This study of the descending river had real and practical, as well as historical importance. He had been about considerably in the great cities of the United States, and had been struck by the amount of good endeavour there. It was not, however, by denouncing Tammany that they could beat it, but by understanding it. They must understand the mechanism by which the Celtic chieftain ruled his clan, and they must deal with these methods by still other methods; and they might often find it more satisfactory to re-moralise the chieftain than to destroy him.

Professor Geddes concluded by saying that he appreciated the admirable suggestion of Mr. Still towards the evolution of civic unions. He was sure Mr. Still had there an idea of great significance which might be developed.

THE END