Chapter 6
Conversely, the revival of sociological interest in this country at present is obviously very largely derived from fresh and freshening work like that of Mr Francis Galton and of the Right Hon. Charles Booth especially. For here in Mr. Galton's biometrics and eugenics is a return to nature, a keen scrutiny of human beings, which is really an orderly fruition of that of the same author's "Art of Travel." Similarly, Mr. Booth's "Survey of London" is as truly a return to nature as was Darwin's Voyage, or his yet more far-reaching studies in his garden and farmyard at home. [Page: 59] Is it not the main support of the subtle theorisings and far-stretched polemic of Prof. Weismann that he can plague his adversaries with the small but literal and concrete mice and hydroids and water fleas with which his theories began? And is it not for a certain lack of such concrete matter of observation that the vast systematisations of M. de Greef, or M. de Roberty, or the original and ingenious readings of Prof. Simon Patten leave us too often unconvinced, even if not sometimes without sufficiently definite understanding of their meaning? The simplest of naturalists must feel that Comte or Spencer, despite the frequently able use of the generalisations of biology, themselves somewhat lacked the first-hand observation of the city and community around them, and suffered thereby; this part of their work obviously not being on a level with the historic interpretations of the one or the psychological productivity of the other. And if, without warlike intent, I may yet strike a conspicuous shield or two within these friendly lists, is it not this one element of concrete observation and illustration which is sometimes lacking to give its full effect to the encyclopædic learning and the sympathetic insight of one of our recent papers, to the historic and poetic interpretations of another, or to the masterly logic of a third?
Before the polemics of our educationists, the voluminous argumentation and casuistic subtlety of our professors of economics and ethics, yet more before the profound speculations of the epistemologists, the mere naturalist observer can but feel abashed like the truant before his schoolmasters; yet he is also not without a certain deep inward conviction, born of experience, that his outdoor world is yet more real, more vast, and more instructive than is theirs. And this impression becomes strengthened, nay verified and established, when he sees that the initiative thinkers from whom these claim to descend, have had in each and every case no merely academic record, but also a first-hand experience, an impulse and message from life and nature. Hence the contributions of Locke, of Comenius, and of Rousseau. Hence the Physiocrats found economics in peasant life; and thus too Adam Smith renewed their science, with due academic logic, doubtless, but from his experience of Glasgow and Kirkcaldy manufactures and trade. Even the idealist Berkeley owed much of his theory to his iridescent tar-water; while surely the greater ethicists are those who have not only been dialecticians, but moral forces in the world of men.
In such ways, then, I would justify the thesis that civics is no abstract study, but fundamentally a matter of concrete and descriptive sociology--perhaps the greatest field of this. Next, that such orderly study is in line with the preliminary sciences, and with the general doctrine of evolution from simple to complex; and finally with the general inquiry into the influence of geographical conditions on social development. [Page: 60] In short, the student of civics must be first of all an observer of cities; and, if so, of their origins and developments, from the small and simple beginnings of which the tiniest hamlet is but an arrested germ. The productive sociologist should thus be of all investigators a wandering student _par excellence_; in the first place, as far as possible, a literal tourist and traveller--and this although like the homely Gilbert White or the world voyaging Darwin, he may do his best work around his own home.
B--INITIAL METHODS OF CONCRETE SURVEY
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.
C--GEOGRAPHICAL DETERMINISM AND ITS DIFFICULTIES
To interpret then our tangle of ideas, both of the city and its citizens, let us now bring more fully to our transverse valley sections, and to each occupation separately, the geographical view-point which we have found of service to elucidate the development of towns and cities upon its longitudinal [Page: 64] slope. But this is neither more nor less than the method of Montesquieu, whose classic "Esprit des Lois" anticipates and initiates so much of that of later writers--Ritter, Buckle, Taine, or Le Play. Once more then let their common, or rather their resultant, doctrine be stated in terms expressing the latest of these more fully than the first. Given the region, its character determines the nature of the fundamental occupation, and this in turn essentially determines the type of family. The nature and method of the occupation must normally determine the mode of its organisation, e.g., the rise and character of a specialised directive class, and the nature of these occupational chiefs as contrasted with the people and with each other. Similarly, the types of family tend to develop their appropriate types of institutions, e.g., for justice, guidance, and of course notably in response to social environment as regards defence or attack.
Thus at this point in fact we seem to be pressing upon the student of sociology the essential argument of geographical and evolutionary determinism, in fact inviting him to adopt a view, indeed to commit himself to a method, which may be not only foreign to his habits, but repugnant to his whole view of life and history. And if able advocacy of this determinist view of society for at least the past five generations has not carried general conviction, why raise so controversial a suggestion, in the guise too of a method professing to harmonise all comers? Yet this is advisedly done; and as no one will deny some civil importance to geographical factors, let patience be granted to examine this aspect of the city's map and shield, and to get from it what it can teach, under the present assurance to the philosophic and idealist critic that his view of other factors, higher and deeper, as supreme in human life, and therefore in city making, will not be forgotten, nor excluded from consideration when we come to them. All that is really insisted upon here is that if anything of naturalistic method of evolutionary conception is to be permitted at all, we must obviously proceed from this simple towards the more complex, and so begin with it here and now.
It is the appropriate slope or steppe, the needful rainfall, that conditions the growth of grass, this which conditions the presence of herds or flocks, and these again which determine the very existence of shepherds. These granted then, not only do the pastoral arts and crafts arise, but the patriarchal type and family develop, and this not only with their hospitality and other virtues, with their nomadic tendencies, at any rate, their unfixed land-tenure, very different from the peasant's, but their slow and skilful [Page: 65] diplomacy (till the pasture is bared or grown again, as the negotiator's interests incline). The patriarch in his venerable age, the caravaneer in his nomadic and exploring youth, his disciplined maturity, thus naturally develop as different types of chief and leader; and it is therefore not until this stage, when all is ready for the entry of Abraham or Job, of Mohammed the camel-driver, or Paul the tent-maker, that any real controversy can arise between the determinist and his opponent, between the democratic and the great-man theories of history, towards which these respectively incline.[6] And at that stage, may not the controversy stimulate a fruitful analysis? After all, what is the claim of free-will but to select among the factors afforded by a given set of circumstances? And the utmost stretch of determinism to which geography and civics may lead us obviously cannot prove the negative of this. But whether the psychologic origins of new ideals be internal to the mind of genius, or imparted by some external source, is a matter obviously beyond the scope of either the geographer or the historian of civics to settle. Enough surely for both controversialists if we use such a means of tabulating facts as to beg the question for neither view; and still better if we can present the case of each without injustice to either, nay, to each with its clearness increased by the sharp edge of contrast. If the geographical determinist thesis on one hand, and its ethical and psychological antithesis on the other, can thus clearly be defined and balanced, their working equilibrium is at hand, even should their complete synthesis remain beyond us.
[6] A fuller study, upon this method, of the essential origins of pastoral evolution, and of its characteristic modern developments, will be found in the writer's "Flower of the Grass," in _The Evergreen_, Edinburgh and Westminster, 1896. See also "La Science Sociale," _passim_, especially in its earlier vols. or its number for Jan. 1905.
D--NEED OF ABSTRACT METHOD FOR NOTATION AND FOR INTERPRETATION
Not only such general geographical studies, but such social interpretations as those above indicated have long been in progress: witness the labours of whole schools of historians and critics, among whom Montsquieu and his immediate following, or in more recent times Buckle and Taine, are but the most prominent; witness the works of geographers like Humboldt, Ritter, Reclus, or of developmental technologists like Boucher de Perthes and regional economists like Le Play. The main lines of a concrete and evolutionary sociology (or at [Page: 66] least _sociography_) have thus been laid down for us; but the task now before us, in our time, in such a society as this--and indeed in such a paper as the present one--its that of extracting from all this general teaching its essential scientific method, one everywhere latent and implicit, but nowhere fully explicit, or at least adequately systematised.
It is in fact only as we can agree upon some definite and orderly method of description that our existing literature of social surveys can be adequately compared or new ones co-operatively undertaken. Hence the importance of discussions of scientific method such as those who have so largely occupied our first volume. Yet, I submit, here lies the means of escaping from these too abstract (and consequently too static) presentments of the general methodology of social science into which sociologists are constantly falling; and to which must be largely ascribed the prevalent distaste for sociology so general in this would-be practical-minded community in which we find ourselves, as indeed also the comparative unattractiveness of our studies to the body of specialist scientific workers, not even excepting those within what we consider sociological fields.
The history of each science, be it mathematics or astronomy, botany, zoology or geology, shows us that it is not enough to have the intelligent observer, or even the interpretative thinker with his personally expressed doctrine. This must be clearly crystallised into a definite statement, method, proposition, "law" or theory, stated in colourless impersonal form before it is capable of acceptance and incorporation into the general body of science. But while astronomer and geologist and naturalist can and do describe both the observational results and their general conceptions in literary form, requiring from the ordinary reader but the patience to master a few unfamiliar terms and ideas, they also carry on their work by help of definite and orderly technical methods, descriptive and comparative, analytic and synthetic. These, as far as possible, have to be crystallised beyond their mere verbal statement into formulae, into tabular and graphic presentments, and thus not only acquire greater clearness of statement, but become more and more active agencies of inquiry--in fact, become literal _thinking-machines_. But while the mathematician has his notations and his calculus, the geographer and geologist their maps, reliefs and sections, the naturalist his orderly classificatory methods, it has been the misfortune and delay of political economy, and no small cause of that "notorious discord and sterility" with which Comte reproached it, that [Page: 67] its cultivators have so commonly sought to dispense with the employment of any definite scientific notations; while even its avowed statisticians, in this country especially, have long resisted the consistent use of graphic methods.
I submit, therefore, for discussion, as even more urgent and pressing than that of the general and abstract methodology of the social sciences, the problem of elaborating a concrete descriptive method readily applicable to the study and comparison of human societies, to cities therefore especially. To do justice to this subject, not only the descriptive labours of anthropologists, but much of the literature of sociology would have to be gone through from the "Tableau Economique" of the Physiocratic School to the "Sociological Tables" of Mr. Spencer, and still more fruitfully to more recent writers. Among these, besides here recognising specially the work of Mr. Booth and its stimulus to younger investigators, I would acknowledge the helpful and suggestive impulse from the group of social geographers which has arisen from the initiative of Le Play[7], and whose classification, especially in its later forms[8], cannot but be of interest and value to everyone whose thought on social questions is not afloat upon the ocean of the abstract without chart or bearings.
[7] La Nomenclature Sociale (Extrait de La Revue, "La Science Sociale," Dec. 1886) Paris, Firmin-Diact, 1887.
[8] Demoulins, La Science Sociale d'apres F. Le Play 1882-1905; Classification Sociale, "La Science Sociale," Jan. 1905.
Yet with all respect to each and all these classifications and methods, indeed with cordially acknowledge personal obligation and indebtedness to them from first to last, no one of these seems fully satisfactory for the present purpose; and it is therefore needful to go into the matter afresh for ourselves, though utilising these as fully as we can.
E--THE CITY-COMPLEX AND ITS USUAL ANALYSIS