[95] Ethics, IX., X. 3. [Greek:  oute gar ek deka anthropon genoit’ an polis, out’ ek deka myriadon eti polis estin.]

[96] Aristotle, Polit., Bk.  VII. ch. iv.

We ourselves are apt to forget that the facts on which Aristotle relied were both real and important.  The history of the Greek and mediaeval City-States shows how effective a stimulus may be given to some of the highest activities and emotions of mankind when the whole environment of each citizen comes within the first-hand range of his senses and memory.  It is now only here and there, in villages outside the main stream of civilisation, that men know the faces of their neighbours and see daily as part of one whole the fields and cottages in which they work and rest.  Yet, even now, when a village is absorbed by a sprawling suburb or overwhelmed by the influx of a new industrial population, some of the older inhabitants feel that they are losing touch with the deeper realities of life.

A year ago I stood with a hard-walking and hard-thinking old Yorkshire schoolmaster on the high moorland edge of Airedale.  Opposite to us was the country-house where Charlotte Bronte was governess, and below us ran the railway, linking a string of manufacturing villages which already were beginning to stretch out towards each other, and threatened soon to extend through the valley an unbroken succession of tall chimneys and slate roofs.  He told me how, within his memory, the old affection for place and home had disappeared from the district.  I asked whether he thought that a new affection was possible, whether, now that men lived in the larger world of knowledge and inference, rather than in the narrower world of sight and hearing, a patriotism of books and maps might not appear which should be a better guide to life than the patriotism of the village street.

This he strongly denied; as the older feeling went, nothing, he said, had taken its place, or would take its place, but a naked and restless individualism, always seeking for personal satisfaction, and always missing it.  And then, almost in the words of Morris and Ruskin, he began to urge that we should pay a cheap price if we could regain the true riches of life by forgetting steam and electricity, and returning to the agriculture of the mediaeval village and the handicrafts of the mediaeval town.

He knew and I knew that his plea was hopeless.  Even under the old conditions the Greek and Italian and Flemish City-States perished, because they were too small to protect themselves against larger though less closely organised communities; and industrial progress is an invader even more irresistible than the armies of Macedon or Spain.  For a constantly increasing proportion of the inhabitants of modern England there is now no place where in the old sense they ‘live.’  Nearly the whole of the class engaged in the direction of English industry, and a rapidly increasing proportion of the manual workers, pass daily in tram or train between sleeping-place and working-place a hundred times more sights than their eyes can take in or their memory retain.  They are, to use Mr. Wells’s phrase, ’delocalised.’[97]