It is from this simple and initial social formula that we have now to
work our way to a fuller understanding of Town and School. [Page: 71]
Immediately, therefore, this must be traced upward towards its
complexities. For Place, it is plain, is no mere topographic site. Work,
conditioned as it primarily is by natural advantages, is thus really
first of all _place-work_. Arises the field or garden, the port, the
mine, the workshop, in fact the _work-place_, as we may simply
generalise it; while, further, beside this arise the dwellings, the
_folk-place_.
Nor are these by any means all the elements we are accustomed to lump
together into Town. As we thus cannot avoid entering into the manifold
complexities of town-life throughout the world and history, we must
carry along with us the means of unravelling these; hence the value of
this simple but precise nomenclature and its regular schematic use.
Thus, while here keeping to simple words in everyday use, we may employ
and combine them to analyse out our Town into its elements and their
inter-relations with all due exactitude, instead of either leaving our
common terms undefined, or arbitrarily defining them anew, as economists
have alternately done--too literally losing or shirking essentials of
Work in the above formula, and with these missing essentials of Folk and
Place also.
Tabular and schematic presentments, however, such as those to which we
are proceeding, are apt to be less simple and satisfactory to reader
than to writer; and this even when in oral exposition the very same
diagram has been not only welcomed as clear, but seen and felt to be
convincing. The reason of this difficulty is that with the spoken
exposition the audience sees the diagram grow upon the blackboard;
whereas to produce anything of the same effect upon the page, it must be
printed at several successive stages of development. Thus our initial
formula,