Civics: as Applied Sociology Part 7

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 impa.s.sioned citizens.h.i.+p 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 citizens.h.i.+p 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] a.n.a.lysis, and how test if it be true? Take then one final ill.u.s.tration; 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 a.s.sociations 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 s.h.i.+eld, 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 s.h.i.+eld 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 n.o.bles, "_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 a.n.a.lysis 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 a.s.sociated 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 munic.i.p.al 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 ill.u.s.tration--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 ill.u.s.trations 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 n.o.blest civic past, both cla.s.sic 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 n.o.bler 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 leaders.h.i.+p--say, rather the devoted, the [Page: 103] impa.s.sioned citizens.h.i.+p--of a single man? And does not his popular park at times come near giving us a vital indication of the needed modern a.n.a.logue 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 citizens.h.i.+p 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 Cla.s.sical, 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 a.n.a.logies are many and worth considering.

While recognising, then, the immense importance of the historic element of our heritage, renaissance and mediaeval, cla.s.sic 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, inst.i.tutions, 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 munic.i.p.al 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 craftsmans.h.i.+p. The great s.h.i.+ps 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 surpa.s.sing 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 s.h.i.+p.

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 a.s.sociated 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 cla.s.sical 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 pa.s.sed into the terminology of sociological science, and even into current speech: is it too much then, similarly, to focus the largely a.n.a.logous 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 const.i.tute 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 _quant.i.tative_ 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 quant.i.tatively 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 cla.s.sification 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 cla.s.sifications 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 s.p.a.ce to the Contemporary and Incipient phases, these now stand as follows:--

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