Civics: as Applied Sociology/Part 1/Written Communications

From PROF. BALDWIN BROWN (Professor of Fine Art in the University of Edinburgh) I am glad of this opportunity of saying how cordially I agree with the method adopted by my friend Professor Geddes in dealing with the life of cities. He treats the modern community and its material shell as things of organic growth, with a past and a future as well as a present, whereas we too often see these wider considerations ignored in favour of some exigency of the moment. A historic British town has recently furnished a striking object-lesson in this connection. The town possesses portions of an ancient city wall and fosse that were made at a time when the town was, for the moment, the most important in Great Britain. Yet the Town Council, a year ago, destroyed part of this wall and filled a section of the fosse for the purpose of providing a site for a new elementary school. No doubt, in that school, books "approved by the Department" will instruct scholars in the past history of the burgh, but the living witness of that history must first of all be carefully obliterated. All the rest of this ancient and historic enceinte was condemned a few weeks ago to complete destruction, merely on the plea that the site would be convenient for workmen's dwellings. The monument has now been saved, but it has taken the whole country to do it!

Here were chosen officials, governors of no mean city, absolutely oblivious of these important interests committed to their care, and all for want of having drilled into them these broader views which Professor Geddes puts forward so well.

He has himself done practical work in Edinburgh on the lines he lays down, and I have lately had occasion to note, and call attention to the advantage to the city of much wise conservatism in regard to our older buildings which he and his associates have shown.

In Edinburgh we have the advantage that our older monuments, in which so much of the past life of the city is enshrined, are firm and solid; and it takes some trouble to knock them down. Hence for some time to come we shall preserve here object-lessons in civic development that will be of interest to the country at large.

From MR. WALTER CRANE (President of Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society)

Professor Geddes' very interesting "Study in City Development" is highly suggestive, and shows how great a difference thoughtful and tasteful treatment might make in dealing with such problems. It is sad to think of the opportunities wasted, and of the more ignorant and often too hasty clearances for traffic which have often been apparently the sole motives in city improvement. The conservation of historic buildings, whenever possible, the planting of trees along our streets, the laying out of gardens, the insistence upon a proportional amount of air and open space to new buildings would go a long way towards making our bricks-and-mortar joyless wildernesses into something human and habitable.

Whether, under favourable circumstances and the rare public spirit of private owners, much can be done, or to any wide extent, so long as absolute individual ownership in land and ground values is allowed, seems to me very doubtful. We cannot hope to see great social improvements without great economic changes, but every effort in the direction of improving the beauty of our cities is welcome to all who have the well-being of the community at heart; and such work as Prof. Geddes is doing should arouse the keenest interest and the earnest attention of all who realise its immense social importance.

From MR. J.H. HARLEY, M.A.

If sociology is ever to vindicate itself as an art, it must be able to analyse and explain the present, and to some extent at least to cast the horoscope of the future. It must feel its way through all the tangled labyrinths of city life, and show us where we have arrived and whither we are going. But this is exactly the part of Professor Geddes' Applied Sociology where he becomes most vague and unsatisfactory. "Enough for the present," we are told, "if it be admitted that the practical man in his thought and action in the present is mainly as yet the too unconscious child of the past, and that in the city he is still working within the grasp of natural conditions." Now we must all be willing to admit that the present is the child of the past, and that we cannot adequately understand the present until we have led up to the present by the study of its antecedents more and less remote. But what Professor Geddes fails to bring out is that it is only in the present or the more immediate past that the City has really become a City in the modern sense of the word. The City as City is a product of the Industrial Revolution. Its huge and casual assemblages of human life, its overcrowding, its poverty line, its East End and its West End, its infantile mortality, its trades massed in their own particular districts, it aliens, its criminals and its vices—all these problems of social pathology arise from the fact that the conditions of modern industry have brought people together who have few interests in common, and who were compelled to arrange themselves in some kind of decent order within a limited area, without sufficient time being given to evolve a suitable environment, or to prepare themselves for the environment which they actually found on every side of them. London in the past, therefore, cannot help us so very much to solve the riddles of London in the present, because London in the past had not developed these social growths or offered a mature ground to those social parasites which make us sometimes despair of being able to get much insight into the London of the present.

The fact seems to be that Prof. Geddes conceives sociology too much as a primary and too little as a secondary science. He defines applied sociology as the application of social survey to social science, when social ratiocination or social philosophy are needed before one can be said to have gauged the extent of the influence which this comprehensive science may have in our actual practice or on our Budget of the future. No doubt, "observation, so far from excluding interpretation, is just the very means of preparing for it," but this preparation must be made in the various specialisms which make up the complete or encyclopædic science of sociology. To me it seems an unwarrantable narrowing of the scope or significance of sociology to say that there is no better method available of teaching it "than that of regional survey, historical as well as geographical." Surely "regional survey" Is the appropriate method in the very simplest and most concrete parts of the complete science of sociology, and even when we come to history proper we must do very much more than make a regional survey. It is very interesting, no doubt, to "survey" history in the course of a summer ramble to the ruins of some old monastery, but unless the monks had kept records of what had been done there in bygone days, the mere outward survey will not carry us further than Prof. Geddes is carried in the very general map which he makes of the whole field of history. In other words, history, in any proper sense, demands more than "survey" in Prof. Geddes' sense of the word. It calls to its aid linguistics, criticism, archaeology, jurisprudence, and politics—there must be comparison and criticism as well as "survey." History is the laboratory in which the sociologist sees his social experiments working out their results, and history is to the sociologist what experiment is to the physician, or the comparative method to the biologist.

This being so, the scope of "civics" as "applied sociology" is immensely widened. The present is the child of the past, but we see that it is only in the present that such ancient groups as the colony of Hanseatic merchants in Old London have shown us what has been the ultimate significance of their embryological life. The modern city bristles with sociological problems which demand a knowledge of most of the specialisms included in the complete science of sociology, and almost invite us to cast the horoscope of the future. We see, as Booth and Rowntree saw before us, the poverty line like a fiery portent at every point of our study, and we are led finally to ask ourselves whether M. Arthur Bauer was not right in choosing the title "Les Classes Sociales" as the most characteristic title he could give to his recent and most suggestive analysis of the general characteristics of social life.

From MR. T.C. HORSFALL (President, Manchester Citizen's Association, &c.)

The teaching of the paper seems to me to be most sound and helpful. The town of the future—I trust of the near future—must by means of its schools, its museums, and galleries, its playgrounds, parks and gymnasia, its baths, its wide tree-planted streets and the belt of unspoilt country which must surround it, bring all its inhabitants in some degree under the best influences of all the regions and all the stages of civilisation, the influences of which, but not the best influences, contribute, and have contributed, to make our towns what they are.

From H. OSMAN NEWLAND (Author of "A Short History of Citizenship")

The failures of democratic governments in the past have been attributable, in part, to the lack of intelligence and self-consciousness among the mass of those who were given a voice in the government of their country. Citizenship, like morality, was allowed to grow by instinct; it was never systematised as a science, or applied as an art. Sparta and Athens approached towards a system of civics much less elaborate than that expounded by Professor Geddes; but in Sparta citizenship became inseparable from Nationalism, and in Athens it scarcely rose above Municipalism. In more modern times, civic education has had to encounter the same difficulty as in America, where the young citizen's first duty is to salute his flag, and as in London, where "Civics" is distributed in doles of local history in which the municipality plays a part altogether out of proportion to its relation to the country, the age, and the world. Civics, as the applied sociology of each individual and each body of interests, has but begun to be dreamed of; and before it can be properly developed it is desirable, if not necessary, that the general public should know something more than at present both of the historic development of the "civic" idea, and of the psychology of aggregations as differentiated from the psychology of the individual. Not until we can make "the man in the street" a conscious citizen, instead of a political automaton, shall we be able to enlist his sympathies with "Civics"; and without those sympathies the sociologist's "Civics" will, I fear, be but partial and inaccurate.

From MR. G. BISSET SMITH (H.M. Registration Examiner for East of Scotland).

There is an elusiveness here and there in this paper which has helped to confirm me in the opinion that it is well to emphasise the fact that Prof. Geddes is not only a dreamer of lofty dreams but a doer and a practical initiator. He has expressed himself not only in words but in art and in architecture, and in educational organisation; and he has in many ways, sometimes indirectly, influenced scholastic and civic activities.

If from the Outlook Tower he dreams of an idealised Edinburgh he has only to reply to the scoffer who asks, "What have you done?" "Circumspice!" There stand the settlements he initiated, the houses beautiful, bright, delectable; and the tower itself is an embodiment of his ideas, an encyclopædia in stone and in storeys.

We must, in criticising this paper, take into account these attempts towards realisation of its principles. The sociological evolutionist is "concerned primarily with origins, but ultimately and supremely with ideals," we were reminded in a recent paper read before this Society. And in the same paper it was affirmed that, "through the formulation of its larger generalisations as ideals, sociology may hope to achieve the necessary return from theory to practice." Thus, if Civics is applied Sociology, we must rest its claims on these criteria. What, then, we have to ask is:—(1) What actually are the generalisations of the present paper? (2) How far they are warranted by verifiable sociological testimony, and (3) What results do they yield when transformed by the touch of emotion into ideals of action? To attempt an adequate answer to these questions would perhaps transcend the limits of this discussion. But merely to raise these questions of presupposition should tend to clarify the discussion. Coming to detail, I may say, as one whose occupation is demographic, I regret the unavoidable briefness of the reference in "Civics" to a "rationalised census of the present condition of the people."

No one, however, who has studied the concluding portion of "The Evolution of Sex" can accuse Prof. Geddes of ignoring questions of population; and his eulogium, written ten years ago, of "Mr. Charles Booth as one of our own latest and best Economists," is familiar to all readers of "Education for Economics and Citizenship." In that extremely suggestive treatise, Prof. Geddes further points out that population must have a primary place in consideration, and that "our studies of the characteristic occupation of region by region are the essential material of a study of its whole civilisation."

Accepting Mr. Branford's definition of occupation as "any and every form of human endeavour, past, present, and future," we see that occupation must have a large place in the description, explanation, and forecasting of the evolution of cities—such as Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee—in the scheme of survey outlined so sweepingly in "Civics."

"Life and Labour of the People in London" contains several general observations almost equally applicable to our largest Scottish cities, with the demographic conditions of which my official duties give me special opportunities for becoming familiar and for regional survey.

In the concluding volume of that great contribution to sociology Mr. Booth (page 23) remarks:—

"Many influences conspire to cause the poor to multiply almost in proportion to their poverty, and operate in the other direction in the case of the better off, almost in proportion to their wealth. But," says Mr. Booth, "when we bring the death-rate into account this law no longer holds."

With the poor living under bad conditions in crowded homes the net increase is diminished. To those of us who are hopeful of improvement by eugenics it is pleasing to note that Mr. Booth—somewhat unlike Mr. Kidd in his well-known "Social Evolution"—is optimistic in his conclusion that "on the whole it may fairly be expected that concurrently with a rising standard of health we may see a fall in birth-rate as well as death-rate, and thus have no cause to fear, as the result of better sanitation, that the largest natural increase in population will ever be contributed by the lowest class." So the heritage of the city may grow not only in quantity but also in quality. From PROFESSOR W.I. THOMAS (Professor in the University of Chicago, U.S.A.)

From the standpoint of its applicability to new countries like America, Professor Geddes' programme is inadequate because of its failure to recognise that a city under these conditions is formed by a rapid and contemporaneous movement of population, and not by the lapse of time. The first permanent white settler came to Chicago precisely one hundred years ago, and the city has a population at present of about two and a quarter millions. It is here not a question of slow historic development but of the rapid drifting towards a certain point, of a population from all quarters of the globe, and the ethnological standpoint therefore becomes of more importance than the historical.

PROFESSOR GEDDES' reply

I am sincerely glad to be able to express myself in substantial agreement with the majority of my critics, only asking them in turn to recognise that this is but the first half of my subject—an outline of civics as in the first place a matter of science, a geographic and historic survey of past conditions, a corresponding census of present ones—here discussed and insisted on as affording the needful base for their demands upon civics as an art, that of effective social service.

In this respect various critics have in fact anticipated large elements of this future portion of my paper, so that in general views, at least, critics and writer are not so far apart as would appear were the preceding pages submitted as a comprehensive outline of the subject, instead of as its scientific introduction merely.

Of criticisms strictly applicable to this paper as it stands, there are really very few. I am confident that the chairman must be quite alone in too modestly applying to his great work that description of London itself, with which the paper (Section A, pp. 104-107) opens, since his volumes offer really our first effective clue to the labyrinth, and his method of intensive and specialised regional survey, the intensest searchlight yet brought to bear upon it.

Taking, however, a concrete point of criticism, such as that of the monumental planning of modern Paris as derived from forest rides, the critic need only walk through any French forest, or even to consult a Baedeker, or other guide-book, with its maps of any historic dwelling and its surroundings, from Chantilly or Fontainebleau to minor ones, to see that this plan, originally devised for the pleasure, success and safety of the hunt, and later adapted to domination and defence, became next appreciated as affording the finest possible perspectives of the palatially rebuilt chateau. So that it is not at all a fantastic hypothesis, but an obvious and inevitable conclusion that Napoleon's and Haussman's plans were not at all invented by them for Paris, but were directly imitated from the familiar landscape architecture of the preceding century, which again was but the simplest development from the spacious forest rides of older hunting nobles, laid out without any thought of the architectural and city developments they were destined in later centuries to determine.

The citizen of Washington had till lately often forgotten that the magnificent perspectives of his city are due to the French landscape-architect (Major L'Enfant) whom Washington imported for the express purpose of laying out his capital; yet it is no less clear that this most magnificent of the New World city plans is derived from Old World forest rides, than that its monumental edifices descend from Renaissance and classic exemplars.

I plead indeed for such studies of the plans of any and every city from the point of view of its natural development. The too purely abstract and subjective sociology of the dwellers of great cities like London would in this way be helped by the facts of their own topographic history, already well known and clearly explained by geographer and historian, towards again feeling with the naturalist that even the modern city is but the most complex evolutionary expression and development of the life of Nature.

This view I take to be indeed a commonplace in France; but I account for its apparent unfamiliarity to English readers from the fact of our scanty forests in this island being left practically wild, our nobles not inhabiting them, but the cultivated pasture and arable regions below—planting trees indeed, "plantations," but seldom woods, and practically never forests at all. This again brings out the fact that the French nobles, despite our urban associations with regard to them have belonged far more than ours to the social formation and tradition of the hunter—while ours, despite their love of sports, are yet fundamentally squires, i.e., essentially and historically approximating to the peasants of their villages. The bearing of all this upon their respective history will be obvious. Here again we have the origins of the vivid contrast of the English or so-called naturalistic style of landscape-gardening with the more formal French tradition. Yet in a very true sense we see the former to be even more highly artificial than the latter. The English citizen who may even admit this way of looking at the contrasted city plans of London and Paris may fail, unless he has appreciated the principle here involved, to see why London and Paris houses are so different—the one separate and self-contained, with its door undefended and open upon the street, while the normal Parisian house is a populous, high-piled tenement around a central court, with high porte cochère closed by massive oaken doors and guarded by an always vigilant and often surly concierge.

A moment of historical reflection suffices to see that the former is the architecture of a long-settled agricultural place, with its spreading undefended villages, in which each household had its separate dwelling, the other a persistence of the Continental fortified city crowded within its walls.

But beyond this we must see the earlier historic, the simpler geographic origins of the French courtyard house as a defensible farmyard, of which the ample space was needed nightly for defence against wild beasts, if not also wilder men, against whom the concierge is not only the antique porter but the primitive sentinel.

I may seem unduly to labour such points, yet do so advisedly, in order to emphasise and make clearer the essential thesis of this portion of my paper—that every scientific survey involves a geographic and historic exploration of origins, but that of the still unwritten chapter, that the far-reaching forelook, idealistic yet also critical, which is needful to any true and enduring contribution to social service, is prepared for by habitually imaging the course of evolution in the past.

Speaking personally, as one whose leisure and practical life have alike been largely spent in the study and the preservation of ancient buildings, I may say that this has not been solely, or even essentially, from an antiquarian interest in the historic past, but still more on behalf of a practical interest—that of the idealistic, yet economic, utilitarian, because educational and evolutionary, transformation of our old cities—old Edinburgh, old Dunfermline, and the like—from their present sordid unhygienic failure; and therefore industrial and commercial insufficiency, towards a future equalling if not transcending the recorded greatness of the civic past.

It has, therefore, been to lay the broadest possible basis of evolutionary science, of geographic and historic fact, for what would otherwise be open to ridicule as a Utopian hope, that of Civics as Applied Social Art, that I have insisted at such length above upon Civics as Applied Social Science.