Society: Its Origin and Development

by Henry K. Rowe

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.