Hence our civic studies began (vol. 1, p. 105) with the survey of a
valley region inhabited by its characteristic types--hunter and
shepherd, peasant and fisher--each on his own level, each evolving or
degenerating within his own region. Hence the concrete picture of such a
typical valley section with its types of occupation cannot be brought
too clearly before our minds.[3]
[3] Fig. 1.
What now of the causes of progress or decay? Are not these first of all
the qualities and defects inherent in that particular social
formation?--though we must also consider how these different types act
and react, how they combine with, transform, subjugate, ruin or replace
each other in region after region. We thus re-interpret the vicissitudes
of history in more general terms, those of the differentiation, progress
or degeneracy of each occupational and social type, and the ascending
and descending oscillations of these types. In short, these occupational
struggles underlie and largely interpret even the conflict of races,
upon which Mr. Stuart-Glennie and other sociologists have so ably
insisted. The fundamental importance of these initial factors of region
and occupation to all studies of races and types, of communities and
institutions, of customs and laws, indeed of language and literature, of
religion and art, even of ideals and individualities, must be my excuse
if I seem to insist, in season and out of season, upon [Page: 61] the
services of Le Play as one of the main founders of sociology; and this
not only _(a)_ on account of his monographic surveys of modern
industrial life--those "Monographies Sociales" from which our current
economic studies of the condition of the worker, of the family budget,
etc., descend--but _(b)_ yet more on account of his vital reconstruction
of anthropology (albeit still far from adequately realised by most
anthropologists) through his renewed insistence upon the elemental
rustic origins of industry, family types, and social organisation alike,
from these simplest reactions of man in his struggle for existence in
varied and varying environment.
It does not suffice to recognise, with many economists, hunting,
pastoral and agricultural formations, as states _preliminary_ to our
present industrial and commercial, imperial, and financial order of
civilisation. This view, still too commonly surviving, is rather of
hindrance than help; what we need is to see our existing civilisation as
the complex struggle and resultant of all these types and their
developments to-day. So far, therefore, from leaving, as at present,
these simple occupational types to the anthropologist, or at best giving
him some scant hospitality within our city museum, we are learning to
see how it is at one time the eager miner, or the conservative shepherd,
or at another the adventurous fisher or hunter who comes concretely upon
the first plane of national, imperial or international politics, and who
awakens new strife among these. We not only begin to see, but the
soldier frankly tells us, how the current sports of youth, and the
unprecedented militarism of the past century, are alike profoundly
connected with the hunting world. Hence the hope of peace lies not only,
as most at present think in the civilised and civilising development of
international law, or of culture intercourse, excellent though these
are, but also in a fuller and complete return to nature than has been
this recent and persistent obsession of our governing classes with the
hunter world almost alone; in short, in adding the gentler, yet wider,
experiences of the naturalist, the sterner experiences of other
occupations also. Nor does such elementary recognition of these main
social formations content us; their local differentiations must be noted
and compared--a comprehensive regional survey, therefore, which does
justice to each local variety of these great types; speaking henceforth
of no mere abstract "hunter," but of the specific hunting types of each
climate, and distinguishing these as clearly as do our own milder
sportsmen of deer-forest and the turnip field from themselves and from
each other. After such needed surveys in detail, we may, indeed must,
compare and generalise them.
Similarly for the pasture, the forest. Every tourist in this country is
struck by the contrast of Swiss towns and cities with our own, and notes
[Page: 62] too that on the Swiss pasture he finds a horde of cattle,
while in Scotland or Yorkshire he left a flock of sheep. And not only
the tourist, but the historian or the economist too often fail to see
how Galashiels or Bradford are developments of the wool hamlet, now
familiar to many in R.L. Stevenson's native Swanston. Again, not only
Swiss wealth, but Swiss character and institutions, go back essentially
to the high pasture and the well-filled byre. That this rich Swiss
cow-pasture rests on limestone, and the poor Scottish sheep-grazing upon
comparatively unmouldering and impermeable gneiss, is no mere matter of
geologist's detail; it affords in each case the literal and concrete
foundation-stone of the subsequent evolution of each region and
population, and this not only in material and economic development, but
even in higher and subtler outcomes, aesthetic, intellectual and
moral.[4] It is for such reasons that one must labour and re-labour this
geographic and determinist aspect of sociology, and this for no merely
scientific reason, but also for practical ones. Nowhere perhaps have
more good and generous souls considered how to better the condition of
their people than in Swiss, or Irish, or Scottish valleys; yet it is one
main reason of the continual failure of all such movements, and of such
minds in the wider world as well, that they do not first acquaint
themselves with the realities of nature and labour sufficiently to
appreciate that the fundamental--I do not say the supreme--question is:
what can be got out of limestone, and what can be got out of gneiss?
Hence the rare educative value of such a concrete sociological diagram
and model as was the Swiss Village at the Paris Exposition of 1900, for
here geographic and economic knowledge and insight were expressed with
artistic skill and sympathy as perhaps never before. Only as similar
object-lessons are worked out for other countries, can we adequately
learn, much less popularly teach, how from nature comes "rustics," and
from this comes civics. But civics and rustics make up the field of
politics; they are the concrete of which politics become the
abstract--commonly the too remotely abstract.
[4] For a fuller justification of this thesis as regards Switzerland,
see the writer's "International Exhibitions," in _International
Monthly_, October, 1900.
For final illustration, let us descend to the sea-level. There again,
taking the fisher, each regional type must be traced in his contribution
to his town. Take for instance the salmon fisher of Norway, the whaler
of Dundee, the herring-fisher of Yarmouth, the cod-fisher of
Newfoundland, the coral fisher of the Ægean; each is a definite varietal
type, one developing or at least tending to develop characteristic
normal family relations, and corresponding social outcomes in
institutions; in which again the appropriate qualities and defects must
be expressed, even as is the quality and twist of the hemp in the
strength of the cable, or as is the chemistry and the microscopic
structure of the alloy in the efficiency of the great gun. [Page: 63]
Our neighbouring learned societies and museums geographical, geological
and the rest, are thus avowedly and consciously so many winter shelters
in which respective groups of regional surveyors tell their tales and
compare their observations, in which they meet to compare their
generalisations from their own observations made in the field with those
made by others. So it must increasingly be for this youngest of
societies. We may, we should, know best our Thames valley, our London
basin, our London survey; but the progress of our science implies as
increasingly varied and thorough an inquiry into rustic and civic
regions and occupations and resultants throughout the whole world
present and past, as does the corresponding world survey with our
geologic neighbours.
I plead then for a sociological survey, rustic and civic, region by
region, and insist in the first place upon the same itinerant field
methods of notebook and camera, even for museum collections and the
rest, as those of the natural sciences. The dreary manuals which have
too long discredited those sciences in our schools, are now giving place
to a new and fascinating literature of first-hand nature study.
Similarly, those too abstract manuals of civics which are at present
employed in schools[5] must be replaced by concrete and regional ones,
their abstract counsels of political or personal perfection thus also
giving place to a corresponding regional idealism which may then be
supplemented from other regions as far as needs demand and circumstances
allow.
[5] For a fuller review of these, compare the writer's "City
Development," in _Contemporary Review_, October, 1904.