Thus we have here a case similar to that occurring so frequently in nature: on the same terrain where a more highly organized plant or animal has no longer room for subsistence, others less exacting in their demands take up their position and flourish. The coming of the new is in fact not infrequently the cause of the disappearance of those already there and of their withdrawal to more favorable surroundings.
If these considerations show that by no means the majority of internal migrations find their objective point in the cities, they at the same time prove that the trend toward the great centers of population can, in itself be looked upon as having an extensive social and economic importance. It produces an alteration in the distribution of population throughout the state; and at its originating and objective points it gives rise to difficulties which legislative and executive authority has hitherto labored, usually with but very moderate success, to overcome. It transfers large numbers of persons almost directly from a sphere of life where barter predominates into one where money and credit exchange prevail, thereby affecting the social conditions of life and the social customs of the manual laboring classes in a manner to fill the philanthropist with grave anxiety.
3. Demographic Segregation and Social Selection[190]
There are two ways in which demographic crystallization may have taken place. A people may have become rigid horizontally, divided into castes, or social strata; or it may be geographically segregated into localized communities, varying in size all the way from the isolated hamlet to the highly individualized nation. Both of these forms of crystallization are breaking down today under the pressure of modern industrialism and democracy, in Europe as well as in America.
The sudden growth of great cities is the first result of the phenomenon of migration which we have to note. We think of this as essentially an American problem. We comfort ourselves in our failures of municipal administration with that thought. This is a grievous deception. Most of the European cities have increased in population more rapidly than in America. This is particularly true of great German urban centers. Berlin has outgrown our own metropolis, New York, in less than a generation, having in twenty-five years added as many actual new residents as Chicago, and twice as many as Philadelphia. Hamburg has gained twice as many in population since 1875 as Boston; Leipzig has distanced St. Louis. The same demographic outburst has occurred in the smaller German cities as well. Beyond the confines of the German Empire, from Norway to Italy, the same is true.
Contemporaneously with this marvellous growth of urban centers we observe a progressive depopulation of the rural districts. What is going on in our New England states, especially in Massachusetts, is entirely characteristic of large areas in Europe. Take France, for example. The towns are absorbing even more than the natural increment of country population; they are drawing off the middle-aged as well as the young. Thus great areas are being actually depopulated.
A process of selection is at work on a grand scale. The great majority today who are pouring into the cities are those who, like the emigrants to the United States in the old days of natural migration, come because they have the physical equipment and the mental disposition to seek a betterment of their fortunes away from home. Of course, an appreciable contingent of such migrant types is composed of the merely discontented, of the restless, and the adventurous; but, in the main, the best blood of the land it is which feeds into the arteries of city life.
Another more certain mode of proof is possible for demonstrating that the population of cities is largely made up either of direct immigrants from the country or of their immediate descendants. In German cities, Hansen found that nearly one-half their residents were of direct country descent. In London it has been shown that over one-third of its population are immigrants; and in Paris the same is true. For thirty of the principal cities of Europe it has been calculated that only about one-fifth of their increase is from the loins of their own people, the overwhelming majority being of country birth.
The first physical characteristic of urban populations, as compared with those of country districts, which we have to note, is their tendency toward that shape of head characteristic of two of our racial types, Teutonic and Mediterranean respectively. It seems as if for some reason the broad-headed Alpine race was a distinctly rural type. Thirty years ago an observer in the ethnically Alpine district of south central France noted an appreciable difference between town and country in the head form of the people. In a half-dozen of the smaller cities his observations pointed to a greater prevalence of the long-headed type than in the country roundabout. Dr. Ammon of Carlsruhe, working upon measurements of thousands of conscripts of the Grand Duchy of Baden, discovered radical differences here between the head form in city and country, and between the upper and lower classes in the larger towns. Several explanations for this were possible. The direct influence of urban life might conceivably have brought it about, acting through superior education, habits of life, and the like. There was no psychological basis for this assumption. Another tenable hypothesis was that in these cities, situated, as we have endeavored to show, in a land where two racial types of population were existing side by side, the city for some reason exerted superior powers of attraction upon the long-headed race. If this were true, then by a combined process of social and racial selection, the towns would be continually drawing unto themselves that tall and blond Teutonic type of population which, as history teaches us, has dominated social and political affairs in Europe for centuries. This suggested itself as the probable solution of the question; and investigations all over Europe during the last five years have been directed to the further analysis of the matter.
Is this phenomenon, the segregation of a long-headed physical type in city populations, merely the manifestation of a restless tendency on the part of the Teutonic race to reassert itself in the new phases of nineteenth-century competition? All through history this type has been characteristic of the dominant classes, especially in military and political, perhaps rather than purely intellectual, affairs. All the leading dynasties of Europe have long been recruited from its ranks. The contrast of this type, whose energy has carried it all over Europe, with the persistently sedentary Alpine race is very marked. A certain passivity, or patience, is characteristic of the Alpine peasantry. As a rule, not characterized by the domineering spirit of the Teuton, this Alpine type makes a comfortable and contented neighbor, a resigned and peaceful subject. Whether this rather negative character of the Alpine race is entirely innate, or whether it is in part, like many of its social phenomena, merely a reflection from the almost invariably inhospitable habitat in which it has long been isolated, we may not pretend to decide.