Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/756

 74 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Social Geography will more fully than ever before demonstrate the continuity and correlation between, on the one hand, the destructive action of man on the surface of the planet, and, on the other, the historical and the contemporary facts of human degeneration and civic degradation. But it will also, unless the work belies the character of its author, demonstrate with unique experience and conviction a continuity of ascent from geographi- cal science to the loftiest aspirations of social idealism.

XV- The geographer's vision of the city as the realization of regional potency is a faculty not of the professed scientists only. It is possessed also, in varying degrees of fulness and clearness, by every wise and active citizen, or at least by every citizen not altogether dehumanized by the machinery of education and affairs, or, as Mr. Wells says, "birched into scholarship and ste- rility." It was the geographer's vision that prompted the city fathers of Glasgow to transform the shallow estuary of the Clyde into one of the great highways of world-commerce. It was the absence of the geographer's vision that prompted Philip II of Spain to cut off the national capital from access to the sea, by re- moving it to the arid central plateau. It has been the geographer's vision which has inspired so many German municipalities to pur- chase and allocate to the commonweal large tracts of suburban territory ; and, wanting the geographer's vision, our own munici- palities have too often allowed the immediate environs of our cities to become the prey of the jerry-builder and the land speculator. These are obvious and conspicuous examples. But the influence of geographical foresight, or its absence, is to be traced into every ramification of civic policy, into every department of civic activity. To draw upon the resources of geographical science for the con- struction and criticism of civic policy is a manifest obligation, or, as it ought to be, privilege and pleasure of the city fathers, who are immediately responsible for civic policy, and for the body of citizens who are mediately responsible for the same. But are there not also whole bodies of the citizens, into whose occupation and livelihood the application of geographical knowledge so large- ly enters that they might almost be called applied geographers?