interests may be broadly defined; it is to emphasise
his particular historic type, his social formation
and influence in the civic whole, if not indeed to
dominate this as far as may be. We are all for
progress, but we each define it in his own way.
Hence one man of industrial energy builds more factories
or slums, another as naturally more breweries to supply
them; and in municipal or national council his line
of action, conscious or unconscious, remains congruent
with these. Representative government fails to
yield all that its inventors hoped of it, simply because
it is so tolerably representative of its majorities;
and there is thus great truth in the common consolation
that our municipal governments, like larger ones,
are seldom much worse than we deserve. Each social
formation, through each of its material activities,
exerts its influence upon the civic whole; and each
of its ideas and ideals wins also its place and power.
At one time the legal and punitive point of view,
directing itself mainly to individual cases, or the
philanthropic, palliating sufferings, dispute the foremost
places; and now in their turn hygienic or educational
endeavours arise, towards treating causes instead
of waiting for consequences. Such endeavours are
still undeniably too vague in thought, too crude in
practice, and the enthusiast of hygiene or education
or temperance may have much to answer for. But
so, also, has he who stands outside of the actual civic
field, whether as philistine or aesthete, utopist
or cynic, party politician or “mug-wump.”
Between all these extremes it is for the united forces
of civic survey and civic service to find the middle
course. [Page: 114] We observe then in the actual
city, as among its future citizens, that our action
is generally the attempt to mould both alike to some
past or passing social formation, and, therefore,
usually towards the type to which our interest and
our survey incline, be this in our own city or more
probably in some earlier one. Even in the actual
passing detail of party politics we are often reminded
how directly continuous are the rivals with puritan
London, with royalist Oxford; but still more is this
the case throughout the history of thought and action,
and the intenser the more plainly; for it is in his
highest moments of conviction and decision that the
Puritan feels most in sympathy with the law or the
prophets of Jerusalem, the scholar with Athens; or
that the man of action—be he the first
French republican or the latest imperialist—most
frankly draws his inspiration from the corresponding
developments of Paris. It is a commonplace of
psychology that our thought is and must be anthropomorphic;
a commonplace of history that it has been Hebraomorphic,
Hellenomorphic, Latinomorphic, and so on by turns.