Page:National Life and Character.djvu/159

 bring with them. It seems difficult to doubt that for many years to come towns will grow everywhere at the expense of villages. They would grow even if they were not more attractive, because rural labour does not expand as rapidly as factories and shops; but they have a fascination of their own, and they rarely relax their hold on those whom they have drawn in. A year's life amid "the crowd, the hum, the shock of men" is apt to give a distaste for that life amid green fields and pastures which poets have consented to praise; the years that make a man a confirmed townsman unfit him, morally and physically, for any other life than in populous streets. It is not often that he wishes to change, but he cannot if he would. Even the passion of the wealthy Englishman for field-sports only draws him into the country during the months sacred or possible to these. Habitually he prefers, like Dr. Johnson, to "watch the full tide of life at Charing Cross."

Now, the influence of cities on civilisation is embalmed in language itself. Almost every word that designates the higher life among men implies town-breeding; every word appropriated anciently to country use has acquired a certain savour of contempt. To the Greeks man was by nature social, or a city-dweller ('); the polite townsman (') was contrasted with the rough dweller in fields (). The Romans repeated and enforced the idea that the body politic was in the fashion of the city (civitas), and that the city man was naturally courteous (urbanus), while the dweller outside was uncouth in manners (rusticus), and the maintainer of an outworn creed (paganus). Later on, we find the legal synonyms for country labourer ("colonus" and "villanus") passing into our language as "clown" and "loon" and "villain." The French