To interpret then our tangle of ideas, both of the city and its citizens, let us now bring more fully to our transverse valley sections, and to each occupation separately, the geographical view-point which we have found of service to elucidate the development of towns and cities upon its longitudinal [Page:  64] slope.  But this is neither more nor less than the method of Montesquieu, whose classic “Esprit des Lois” anticipates and initiates so much of that of later writers—­Ritter, Buckle, Taine, or Le Play.  Once more then let their common, or rather their resultant, doctrine be stated in terms expressing the latest of these more fully than the first.  Given the region, its character determines the nature of the fundamental occupation, and this in turn essentially determines the type of family.  The nature and method of the occupation must normally determine the mode of its organisation, e.g., the rise and character of a specialised directive class, and the nature of these occupational chiefs as contrasted with the people and with each other.  Similarly, the types of family tend to develop their appropriate types of institutions, e.g., for justice, guidance, and of course notably in response to social environment as regards defence or attack.

Thus at this point in fact we seem to be pressing upon the student of sociology the essential argument of geographical and evolutionary determinism, in fact inviting him to adopt a view, indeed to commit himself to a method, which may be not only foreign to his habits, but repugnant to his whole view of life and history.  And if able advocacy of this determinist view of society for at least the past five generations has not carried general conviction, why raise so controversial a suggestion, in the guise too of a method professing to harmonise all comers?  Yet this is advisedly done; and as no one will deny some civil importance to geographical factors, let patience be granted to examine this aspect of the city’s map and shield, and to get from it what it can teach, under the present assurance to the philosophic and idealist critic that his view of other factors, higher and deeper, as supreme in human life, and therefore in city making, will not be forgotten, nor excluded from consideration when we come to them.  All that is really insisted upon here is that if anything of naturalistic method of evolutionary conception is to be permitted at all, we must obviously proceed from this simple towards the more complex, and so begin with it here and now.

It is the appropriate slope or steppe, the needful rainfall, that conditions the growth of grass, this which conditions the presence of herds or flocks, and these again which determine the very existence of shepherds.  These granted then, not only do the pastoral arts and crafts arise, but the patriarchal type and family develop, and this not only with their hospitality and other virtues, with their nomadic tendencies, at any rate, their unfixed land-tenure, very different