Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/395

 STUDIES IN POLITICAL AREAS Z77

what is particularly noteworthy in the matter, the towns of the Baltic most favored in geographical position, Stettin, Danzig, and Konigsberg, advanced in that first growth more slowly ; only, however, to stop the process later and to resume it again earlier. In the first half of the fourteenth century the largest cities of the Baltic at that time, Liibeck and Danzig, may be estimated to have had forty thousand inhabitants each.' We must imagine the rapid development of the great cities of antiquity on this order. Australia affords the best examples of the kind in pres- ent times, for there the peripheral character of all colonial development is accentuated by the nature of the country, which concentrates all the productive industries on anything like a large scale, especially the cultivation of wheat and sugar cane, also sheep raising and gold mining, in effect upon a narrow strip of coast averaging about one hundred and eighty-five miles in breadth. Hence we find cities like Sydney, with 383,000, and Melbourne, with 491,000 inhabitants (1891), whose mag- nificence forms a sharp contrast to the barrenness and monot- ony of the rural districts, with their mere beginnings of civil- ization. The hypertrophic development of the young city of Brisbane (189 1, population 94,000) makes itself felt in the separatist tendency of North Queenland, as in the influence of social parties upon the course of politics in New South Wales and Victoria.

The concentration of all political organization in the city arose first out of a matter of space, namely, out of the difficulty of exercising control over wide areas. It is to be found in the Mediterranean more than anywhere else — among Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and later among the Italians, for, as Freeman says, mediaeval Italy with its city-states is "a living repetition of the political history of ancient Greece." This fact is intimately connected with the character of the country, where the moisture and fertile soil are scattered, often only oasis-like here and there, so that the settlements in general are less numerous than else- where, less evenly distributed, though in individual cases larger and more like cities. In consequence, the cities attach them-

■ See the criticism of these figures in Schafer's Die Hansestadte, pp. 2i<) et seq.