Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/747

 SCIENCE AND CITIZENSHIP 731

the carbonaceous logic of his occupation, are stokers and chimney- sweeps. It requires little observation and less historic insight to verify the affirmation that urban expansion in the nineteenth cen- tury was largely determined by the unavowed but real ideals of a coal civilization.

The archaeologists who are so industriously deciphering the buried histories of cities have found the accumulated survivals of seventeen different cities in Rome. And so for other historic cities, the successive phases of city formations are marked by lay- ers of superimposed debris, like geological strata, with which in- deed they are in direct continuity. Each successive civic forma- tion is characterized by the impressions and the marks of its contemporary inhabitants, which survive in respective material structures like so many sociological fossils. Looked at from this point of view, the coal-laden trucks and the factory chimney stack with all their associated structures, economic and aesthetic, are actual or incipient sociological fossils of the coal cities of the nineteenth century.

To the dwellers in these coal towns for cities in the proper sense they, most of them, were not science presents itself as a kind of inverted philosopher's stone. The accumulated applica- tions of science in the coal civilizations did not end with the pro- duction of gold, but rather began with it, more particularly that which came from Australia and California about mid-century. Given a possession or control of sufficient quantity of the precious metal, the citizen finds himself able to initiate a cycle of transmu- tations and to carry it on up to a certain point, after which it appears that the cycle completes itself automatically. This sort of scientific magic transformed coal into power to make cheap goods for the consumption of cheap laborers, and the cheap labor thus applied itself to produce more power to make more cheap goods for the consumption of still cheaper laborers; and so on in- definitely. This ever-extending series of transformations evi- dently reaches its culmination in the growth of an ideal city like East London which so magnificently surpasses all other cities in its accumulated reservoir of cheap labor. Such are the ideals of