within a limited area, without sufficient time being given to evolve a suitable environment, or to prepare themselves for the environment which they actually found on every side of them.  London in the past, therefore, cannot help us so very much to solve the riddles of London in the present, because London in the past had not developed these social growths or offered a mature ground to those social parasites which make us sometimes despair of being able to get much insight into the London of the present.

The fact seems to be that Prof.  Geddes conceives sociology too much as a primary and too little as a secondary science.  He defines applied sociology as the application of social survey to social science, when social ratiocination or social philosophy are needed before one can be said to have gauged the extent of the influence which this comprehensive science may have in our actual practice or on our Budget of the future.  No doubt, “observation, so far from excluding interpretation, is just the very means of preparing for it,” but this preparation must be made in the various specialisms which make up the complete or encyclopaedic science of sociology.  To me it seems an unwarrantable narrowing of the scope or significance of sociology to say that there is no better method available of teaching it “than that of regional survey, historical as well as geographical.”  Surely “regional survey” Is the appropriate method in the very simplest and most concrete parts of the complete science of sociology, and even when we come to history proper we must do very much more than make a regional survey.  It is very interesting, no doubt, to “survey” history in the course of a summer ramble to the ruins of some old monastery, but unless the monks had kept records of what had been done there in bygone days, the mere outward survey will not carry us further than Prof.  Geddes is carried in the very general map which he makes of the whole field of history.  In other words, history, in any proper sense, demands more than “survey” in Prof.  Geddes’ sense of the word.  It calls to its aid linguistics, criticism, archaeology, jurisprudence, and politics—­there must be comparison and criticism as well as “survey.”  History is the laboratory in which the sociologist sees his social experiments working out their [Page:  133] results, and history is to the sociologist what experiment is to the physician, or the comparative method to the biologist.

This being so, the scope of “civics” as “applied sociology” is immensely widened.  The present is the child of the past, but we see that it is only in the present that such ancient groups as the colony of Hanseatic merchants in Old London have shown us what has been the ultimate significance of their embryological life.  The modern city bristles with sociological problems which demand a knowledge of most of the specialisms included in the complete science of sociology, and almost invite us to cast the horoscope of the future.  We see, as Booth and Rowntree saw before us, the poverty line like a fiery portent at every point of our study, and we are led finally to ask ourselves whether M. Arthur Bauer was not right in choosing the title “Les Classes Sociales” as the most characteristic title he could give to his recent and most suggestive analysis of the general characteristics of social life.