Professor Geddes' very interesting "Study in City Development" is highly
suggestive, and shows how great a difference thoughtful and tasteful
treatment might make in dealing with such problems. It is sad to think
of the opportunities wasted, and of the more ignorant and often too
hasty clearances for traffic which have often been apparently the sole
motives in city improvement. The conservation of historic buildings,
whenever possible, the planting of trees along our streets, the laying
out of gardens, the insistence upon a proportional amount of air and
open space to new buildings would go a long way towards making our
bricks-and-mortar joyless wildernesses into something human and
habitable.
Whether, under favourable circumstances and the rare public spirit of
private owners, much can be done, or to any wide extent, so long as
absolute individual ownership in land and ground values is allowed,
seems to me very doubtful. We cannot hope to see great social
improvements without great economic changes, but every effort in the
direction of improving the beauty of our cities is welcome to all who
have the well-being of the community at heart; and such work as Prof.
Geddes is doing should arouse the keenest interest and the earnest
attention of all who realise its immense social importance.
From MR. J.H. HARLEY, M.A.
If sociology is ever to vindicate itself as an art, it must be able to
analyse and explain the present, and to some extent at least to cast the
horoscope of the future. It must feel its way through all the tangled
labyrinths of city life, and show us where we have arrived and whither
we are going. But this is exactly the part of Professor Geddes' Applied
Sociology where he becomes most vague and unsatisfactory. "Enough for
the present," we are told, "if it be admitted that the practical man in
his thought and action in the present is mainly as yet the too
unconscious child of the past, and that in the city he is still working
within the grasp of natural conditions." Now we must all be willing to
admit that the present is the child of the past, and that we cannot
adequately understand [Page: 132] the present until we have led up to
the present by the study of its antecedents more and less remote. But
what Professor Geddes fails to bring out is that it is only in the
present or the more immediate past that the City has really become a
City in the modern sense of the word. The City as City is a product of
the Industrial Revolution. Its huge and casual assemblages of human
life, its overcrowding, its poverty line, its East End and its West End,
its infantile mortality, its trades massed in their own particular
districts, it aliens, its criminals and its vices--all these problems of
social pathology arise from the fact that the conditions of modern
industry have brought people together who have few interests in common,
and who were compelled to arrange themselves in some kind of decent
order within a limited area, without sufficient time being given to
evolve a suitable environment, or to prepare themselves for the
environment which they actually found on every side of them. London in
the past, therefore, cannot help us so very much to solve the riddles of
London in the present, because London in the past had not developed
these social growths or offered a mature ground to those social
parasites which make us sometimes despair of being able to get much
insight into the London of the present.
The fact seems to be that Prof. Geddes conceives sociology too much as a
primary and too little as a secondary science. He defines applied
sociology as the application of social survey to social science, when
social ratiocination or social philosophy are needed before one can be
said to have gauged the extent of the influence which this comprehensive
science may have in our actual practice or on our Budget of the future.
No doubt, "observation, so far from excluding interpretation, is just
the very means of preparing for it," but this preparation must be made
in the various specialisms which make up the complete or encyclopædic
science of sociology. To me it seems an unwarrantable narrowing of the
scope or significance of sociology to say that there is no better method
available of teaching it "than that of regional survey, historical as
well as geographical." Surely "regional survey" Is the appropriate
method in the very simplest and most concrete parts of the complete
science of sociology, and even when we come to history proper we must do
very much more than make a regional survey. It is very interesting, no
doubt, to "survey" history in the course of a summer ramble to the ruins
of some old monastery, but unless the monks had kept records of what had
been done there in bygone days, the mere outward survey will not carry
us further than Prof. Geddes is carried in the very general map which he
makes of the whole field of history. In other words, history, in any
proper sense, demands more than "survey" in Prof. Geddes' sense of the
word. It calls to its aid linguistics, criticism, archaeology,
jurisprudence, and politics--there must be comparison and criticism as
well as "survey." History is the laboratory in which the sociologist
sees his social experiments working out their [Page: 133] results, and
history is to the sociologist what experiment is to the physician, or
the comparative method to the biologist.
This being so, the scope of "civics" as "applied sociology" is immensely
widened. The present is the child of the past, but we see that it is
only in the present that such ancient groups as the colony of Hanseatic
merchants in Old London have shown us what has been the ultimate
significance of their embryological life. The modern city bristles with
sociological problems which demand a knowledge of most of the
specialisms included in the complete science of sociology, and almost
invite us to cast the horoscope of the future. We see, as Booth and
Rowntree saw before us, the poverty line like a fiery portent at every
point of our study, and we are led finally to ask ourselves whether M.
Arthur Bauer was not right in choosing the title "Les Classes Sociales"
as the most characteristic title he could give to his recent and most
suggestive analysis of the general characteristics of social life.