FROM COUNTRY TO CITY
177. =Enlarging the Social Environment.=--In the story of the family
and the rural community it has become clear that the normal individual
as he grows to maturity lives in an expanding circle of social
relations. The primary unit of his social life is the family in the
home. There the elemental human instincts are satisfied. There while a
child he learns the first lessons of social conduct. From the home he
enters into the larger life of the community. He takes his place in
the school, where he touches the lives of other children and learns
that he is a part of a larger social order. He gets into the current
of community life and finds out the importance of local institutions
like the country store and the meeting-house. He becomes accustomed to
the ways that are characteristic of country people, and finds a place
for himself in the industry and social activity of the countryside.
When the boy who has grown up in a rural community comes to manhood,
his natural tendency is to accept the occupation of farming with which
he has become acquainted in boyhood, to woo a country maid for a mate,
and to make for himself a rural home after the pattern of his
ancestors. In that case his social environment remains restricted. His
relations are with nature rather than with men. His horizon is narrow,
his interests limited. The institutions that mould him are few, the
forces that stimulate to progress are likely to be lacking altogether.
He need not, but he usually does, cease to grow.
178. =Characteristics of the City.=--Certain individuals find the
static life of the country unbearable. Their nature demands larger
scope in an expanding environment. To them the stirring town beckons,
and they are restless until they escape. The city is a centre of
social life where the individual feels a greater stimulus than in the
home or the rural community. It resembles the family and the village
in providing social relations and an interchange of ideas, but it
surpasses them in the large scale of its activities. It presents many
of the same social characteristics that they do, but geared in each
case for higher speed. Its activities are swifter and more varied. Its
associations are more numerous and kaleidoscopic. Its people are less
independent than in the country; control, economic and political, is
more pervasive, even though crude in method. Change is more rapid in
the city, because the forces that are at work are charged with dynamic
energy. Weakness in social structure and functioning is conspicuous.
In the large cities all these are intensified, but they are everywhere
apparent whenever a community passes beyond the village stage. The
line that separates the village or small town from the city is an
arbitrary one. The United States calls those communities rural that
have a population not exceeding twenty-five hundred, but it is less a
question of population than of interests and activities. When
agriculture gives place to trade or manufacturing as the leading
economic interest; when the community takes on the social
characteristics that belong to urban life; and when places of business
and amusement assume a place of importance rather than the home, the
school, and the church, the community passes into the urban class.
Names and forms of government are of small consequence in
classification compared with the spirit and ways of the community.
179. =How the City Grows.=--The city grows by the natural excess of
births over deaths and by immigration. Without immigration the city
grows more slowly but more wholesomely. Immigration introduces an
alien element that has to adjust itself to new ways and does not
always fuse readily with the native element. This is true of
immigration from the country village as well as from a foreign
country, but an American, even though brought up differently, finds it
easier to adapt himself to his new environment. An increasingly large
percentage of children are born and grow to maturity in the city.
There are thousands of urban communities of moderate size in America,
where there are few who come in from any distance, but for nearly a
hundred years in the older parts of the country a rural migration has
been carrying young people into town, and the recent volume of foreign
immigration is spilling over from the large cities into the smaller
urban centres, so that the mixture of population is becoming general.
180. =The Attraction of the City.=--Foreign immigration is a subject
that must be treated by itself; rural immigration needs no prolonged
discussion once the present limitations of life in the country are
understood. Multitudes of ambitious young people are not contented
with the opportunities offered by the rural environment. They want to
be at the strategic points of the world's activities, struggling for
success in the thick of things. The city attracts the country boy who
is ambitious, exactly as old Rome attracted the immature German. The
blare of its noisy traffic, the glare of its myriad lights, the rush
and the roar and the rabble all urge him to get into the scramble for
fun and gain. The crowd attracts. The instinct of sociability draws
people together. Those who are unfamiliar with rural spaces and are
accustomed to live in crowded tenements find it lonesome in the
country, and prefer the discomfort of their congested quarters in town
to the pure air and unspoiled beauty of the country. They love the
stir of the streets, and enjoy sitting on the door-steps and wandering
up and down the sidewalks, feeling the push of the motley crowd. Those
who leave the country for the city feel all these attractions and are
impelled by them, but beyond these attractions, re-enforcing them by
an appeal to the intellect, are the economic advantages that lie in
the numerous occupations and chances for promotion to high-salaried
positions, the educational advantages for children and youth in the
better-graded schools, the colleges, the libraries, and the other
cultural institutions, and such social advantages as variety of
entertainment, modern conveniences in houses and hotels, more
beautiful and up-to-date churches, well-equipped hospitals, and
comfortable and convenient means of transportation from place to
place.
181. =Making a Countryman into a Citizen.=--It is important to enter
into the spirit of the young people who prefer the streets and blocks
of the town to the winding country roads, and are willing to sacrifice
what there is of beauty and leisure in rural life for the ugliness,
sordidness, and continuous drive of the city; to understand that a
greater driving force, stirring in the soul of youth and thrusting
upon him with every item of news from the city, is impelling him to
disdain what the country can give him and to magnify the
counter-attractions of the town. He has felt the monotony and the
contracted opportunity of farm life as he knows it. He has experienced
the drudgery of it ever since he began to do the chores. Familiar only
with the methods of his ancestors, he knows that labor is hard and
returns are few. He may look across broad acres that will some day be
his, but he knows that his father is "land poor." As a farmer he sees
no future for agriculture. He has known the village and the
surrounding country ever since he graduated from the farmyard to the
schoolhouse, and came into association with the boys and girls of the
neighborhood. He knows the economic and social resources of the
community and is satisfied that he can never hope for much enjoyment
or profit in the limited rural environment. The school gave him little
mental stimulus, but opened the door ajar into a larger world. The
church gave him an orthodox gospel in terms of divinity and its
environment rather than humanity on earth, but stirred vaguely his
aspirations for a fuller life. He has sounded the depths of rural
existence and found it unsatisfying. He wants to learn more, to do
more, to be more.
One eventful day he graduates from the village to the city, as years
before he graduated from the home into the community. By boat or
train, or by the more primitive method of stage-coach or afoot, he
travels until he joins the surging crowd that swarms in the streets.
He feels himself thrilling with the consciousness that he is moving
toward success and possibly greatness. He does not stop to think that
hundreds of those who seek their fortune in the city have failed, and
have found themselves far worse off than the contented folk back in
the home village. The newcomer establishes himself in a boarding-house
or lodging-house which hundreds of others accept as an apology for a
home, joins the multitude of unemployed in a search for work, and is
happy if he finds it in an office that is smaller and darker than the
wood-shed on the farm, or behind a counter where fresh air and
sunlight never penetrate. He will put up with these non-essentials,
for he expects in days ahead to move higher up, when the large rewards
that are worth while will be his.
In the ranks of business he measures his wits with others of his kind.
He apes their manners, their slang, and their tone inflections. He
imitates their fashions in clothes, learns the popular dishes in the
restaurants, and if of feminine tastes gives up pie for salad. He goes
home after hours to his small and dingy bedroom, tired from the drain
upon his vitality because of ill-ventilated rooms and ill-nourishing
food, but happy and free. There are no chores waiting for him now, and
there is somewhere to go for entertainment. Not far away he may have
his choice of theatres and moving-picture shows. If he is æsthetically
or intellectually inclined, there are art-galleries and libraries
beckoning him. If his earnings are a pittance and he cannot afford the
theatre, and if his tastes do not draw him to library or museum, the
saloon-keeper is always ready to be his friend. The youth from the
country would be welcomed at the Young Men's Christian Association on
the other side of the city, or at a church if there happened to be a
social or religious function that opened the building, but the saloon
is always near, always open, and always cordial. Poor or rich, or a
stranger, it matters not, let him enter and enjoy the poor man's club.
It is warm and pleasant there and he will soon make friends.
182. =Mental and Moral Changes.=--The readjustments that are necessary
in the transfer from country to city are not accomplished without
considerable mental and moral shock. Changing habits of living are
paralleled by changing habits of thought. Old ideas are jostled by
new every hour of the day. At the table, on the street, in office or
store, at the theatre or church the currents of thought are different.
Social contacts are more numerous, relations are more shifting,
intellectual affinities and repulsions are felt constantly; mental
interactions are so frequent that stability of beliefs and
independence of thought give way to flexibility and uncertainty and
openness to impression. Group influence asserts its power over the
individual.
Along with the influence of the group mind goes the influence of what
may be called the electrical atmosphere of the city. The newcomer from
the country is very conscious of it; to the old resident it becomes
second nature. City life is noisy. The whole industrial system is
athrob with energy. The purring of machinery, the rattle and roar of
traffic, the clack and toot of the automobile, the clanging of bells,
and the chatter of human tongues create a babel that confuses and
tires the unsophisticated ear and brain. They become accustomed to the
sounds after a time, but the noise registers itself continually on the
sensitive nervous system, and many a man and woman breaks at last
under the strain. Another element that adds to the nervous strain is
haste. Life in the city is a stern chase after money and pleasure.
Everybody hurries from morning until night, for everything moves on
schedule, and twenty-four hours seem not long enough to do the world's
work and enjoy the world's fun. Noise and hurry furnish a mental
tension that charges the urban atmosphere with excitement. Purveyors
of news and amusement have learned to cater to the love of excitement.
The newspaper editor hunts continually for sensations, and sometimes
does not scruple to twist sober fact into stirring fiction. The
book-stall and the circulating library supply the novel and the cheap
magazine to give smack to the jaded palate that cannot relish good
literature. The theatre panders to the appetite for a thrill.
In these circumstances lie the possibilities of moral shock. In the
city there is freedom from the old restraint that the country
community imposed. In the city the countryman finds that he can do as
he pleases without the neighbors shaking their heads over him. In the
absence of such restraint and with the social contact of new friends
he may rapidly lower his moral standards as he changes his manners and
his mental habits. It does not take long to shuffle off the old ways;
it does not take much push or pull to make the unsophisticated boy or
girl lose balance and drift toward lower ideals than those with which
they came. Not a few find it hard to keep the moral poise in the
whirlpool of mental distraction. It is these effects of the urban
environment that help to explain the social derelicts that abound in
the cities. It is the weakness of human nature, along with the
economic pressure, that accounts for the drunkenness, vice, and crime
that constitute so large a problem of city life and block the path of
society's development. They are a part of the imperfection that is
characteristic of this stage of human progress, and especially of the
twentieth-century city. They are not incurable evils, they demand a
remedy, and they furnish an inspiring object of study for the
practitioner of social disease.
He who escapes business and moral failure has open wide before him in
the city the door of opportunity. He may, if he will, meet all the
world and his wife in places where the people gather, touching elbows
with individuals from every quarter of the country, with persons of
every class and variety of attainment, with believers of every
political, æsthetic, and religious creed. In such an atmosphere his
mind expands like the exotic plant in a conservatory. His individual
prejudices fall from him like worn-out leaves from the trees. He
begins to realize that other people have good grounds for their
opinions and practices that differ from his own, and that in most
cases they are better than his, and he quickly adjusts himself to
them. The city stimulates life by its greater social resources, and
forms within its borders more highly developed human groups. Beyond
the material comforts and luxuries that the city supplies are the
social values that it creates in the associations and organizations of
men and women allied for the philanthropic, remedial, and
constructive purposes that are looking forward to the slow progress of
mankind toward its highest ideals.
183. =The City as a Social Centre.=--The city is an epitome of
national and even world life, as the farm is community life in
miniature. Its social life is infinitely complex, as compared with the
rural village. Distances that stretch out for miles in the country,
over fields and woods and hills, are measured in the city by blocks of
dwellings and public buildings, with intersecting streets, stretching
away over a level area as far as the eye can see. Social institutions
correspond to the needs of the inhabitants, and while there are a few
like those in the country, because certain human needs are the same,
there is a much larger variety in the city because of the great number
of people of different sorts and the complexity of their demands.
Every city has its business centres for finance, for wholesale trade,
and for retail exchange, its centres for government, and for
manufacturing; it has its railroad terminals and often its wharves and
shipping, its libraries, museums, schools, and churches. All these are
gathering places for groups of people. But there is no one social
centre for all classes; rather, the people of the city are associated
in an infinite number of large and small groups, according to the
mutual interests of their members. But if the city has no four
corners, it is itself a centre for a large district of country. As the
village is the nucleus that binds together outlying farms and hamlets,
so the city has far-flung connections with rural villages and small
towns in a radius of many miles.
184. =The Importance of the City.=--The city has grown up because it
was located conveniently for carrying on manufacturing and trade on a
large scale. It is growing in importance because this is primarily an
industrial age. Its population is increasing relatively to the rural
population, and certain cities are growing enormously, in spite of Mr.
Bryce's warning that it is unfortunate for any city to grow beyond a
population of one hundred thousand. The importance of the city as a
social centre is apparent when we remember that in America, according
to the census of 1910, 46.3 per cent of the people live in
communities of more than 2,500 population, while 31 per cent of the
whole are inhabitants of cities of 25,000 or more population. When
nearly one-third of all the people of the nation live in communities
of such size, the large city becomes a type of social centre of great
significance. At the prevailing rate of growth a majority of the
American people will soon be dwelling in cities, and there seems to be
no reason to expect a reversal of tendency because modern invention is
making it possible for fewer persons on the farm to supply the
agricultural products that city people need. This means, of course,
that the temper and outlook of mind will be increasingly urban, that
social institutions generally will have the characteristics of the
city, that the National Government will be controlled by that part of
the American citizens that so far has been least successful in
governing itself well.
185. =Municipal History.=--The city has come to stay, and there is in
it much of good. It has come into existence to satisfy human need, and
while it may change in character it is not likely to be less important
than now. Its history reveals its reasons for existence and indicates
the probabilities of its future. The ancient city was an overgrown
village that had special advantages for communication and
transportation of goods, or that was located conveniently for
protection against neighboring enemies. The cities of Greece
maintained their independence as political units, but most social
centres that at first were autonomous became parts of a larger state.
The great cities were the capitals of nations or empires, and to
strike at them in war was to aim at the vitals of an organism. Such
were Thebes and Memphis in Egypt, Babylon and Nineveh in the
Tigris-Euphrates valley, Carthage and Rome in the West. Such are
Vienna and Berlin, Paris and London to-day. Lesser cities were centres
of trade, like Corinth or Byzantium, or of culture, such as Athens.
Such was Florence in the Middle Ages, and such are Liverpool and
Leipzig to-day. The municipalities of the Roman Empire marked the
climax of civic development in antiquity.
The social and industrial life of the Middle Ages was rural. Only a
few cities survived the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, and new
centres of importance did not arise until trade revived and the
manufacturing industry began to concentrate in growing towns about the
time of the Crusades. Then artisans and tradesmen found their way to
points convenient to travel and trade, and a city population began the
processes of aggregation and congregation. They grew up rough in
manners and careless of sanitation and hygiene, but they developed
efficiency in local government and an inclination to demand civic
rights from those who had any outside claim of control; they began to
take pride in their public halls and churches, and presently they
founded schools and universities. Wealth increased rapidly, and some
of the cities, like the Hansa towns of the north, and Venice and Genoa
in the south, commanded extensive and profitable trade routes.
Modern cities owe their growth to the industrial revolution and the
consequent increase of commerce. The industrial centres of northern
England are an illustration of the way in which economic forces have
worked in the building of cities. At the middle of the eighteenth
century that part of Great Britain was far less populous and
progressive than the eastern and southern counties. It had small
representation in Parliament. It was provincial in thought, speech,
and habits. It was given over to agriculture, small trade, and rude
home manufacture. Presently came the revolutionary inventions of
textile machinery, of the steam-engine, and of processes for
extracting and utilizing coal and iron. The heavy, costly machinery
required capital and the factory. Concentrated capital and machinery
required workers. The working people were forced to give up their
small home manufacturing and their unprofitable farming and move to
the industrial barracks and workrooms of the manufacturing centres.
These centres sprang up where the tools were most easily and cheaply
obtained, and where lay the coal-beds and the iron ore to be worked
over into machinery. From Newcastle on the east, through Sheffield,
Leeds, Birmingham, and Manchester, to Liverpool on the west and
Glasgow over the Scottish border grew up a chain of thriving cities,
and later their people were given the ballot that was taken from
certain of the depopulated rural villages. These cities have obtained
a voice of power in the councils of the nation. In America the
industrial era came somewhat later, but the same process of
centralizing industry went on at the waterfalls of Eastern rivers, at
railroad centres, and at ocean, lake, and Gulf ports. Commerce has
accelerated the growth of many of these manufacturing towns. Increase
of industry and population has been especially rapid in the great
ports that front the two oceans, through whose gates pour the floods
of immigrants, and in the interior cities like Chicago, that lie at
especially favorable points for railway, lake, or river traffic. As in
the Middle Ages, universities grew because teachers went where
students were gathered, and students were attracted to the place where
teachers were to be found, so in the larger cities the more people
there are and the more numerous is the population, the greater the
amount of business. It pays to be near the centre of things.
READING REFERENCES
HOWE: _The Modern City and Its Problems_, pages 9-49.
GILLETTE: _Constructive Rural Sociology_, pages 32-46.
STRONG: _Our World_, pages 228-283.
NEARING AND WATSON: _Economics_, pages 123-132.
GIRY AND REVILLE: _Emancipation of the Mediæval Towns._
BLISS: _New Encyclopedia of Social Reform_, art. "Cities."