our “City” proper upon the “Town.”  Thus it is that the ideals and the achievements of one day and generation and city are ever melting away, and passing out of sight of the next; so that to the joy or sorrow of the successors the new page seems well nigh bare, though ever there comes faintly through some image or at least blurred suggestion of the fading past.  Hence each page of history is a palimpsest.  Hence our modern town, even when yesterday but prairie, was no mere vacant site, but was at once enriched and encumbered by the surviving traditions of the past; so that even its new buildings are for the most part but vacant shells of past art, of which now only the student cares to trace the objective annals, much less penetrate to the inner history.  So for the decayed Renaissance learning of our schools, for the most part so literally dead since the “Grammarian’s Funeral”; and so, too, for the unthinking routines, the dead customs and conventions, and largely too the laws and rituals of our urban lives.  Hence, then, it is that for the arrest and the decay of cities we have no need to go for our examples to the ancient East.  These processes, like those of individual senility and death, are going on everywhere day by day.

Upon the new page, then, it is but a complexer “Town” and “School” anew:  we have no continuing City.  This too commonly has existed at its best but for the rare generation which created it, or little longer; though its historic glories, like those of sunset and of after-glow, may long shed radiance and glamour upon its town, and linger in the world’s memory long after not only these have faded, but their very folk have vanished, their walls fallen, nay their very site been buried or forgotten.  Upon all these degrees of dying, all these faint and fading steps between immortality and oblivion, we may arrange what we call our historic cities.  Obviously in the [Page:  95] deeper and more living sense the city exists only in actualising itself; and thus to us it is that the ideal city lies ever in the future.  Yet it is the very essence of this whole argument that an ideal city is latent in every town.  Where shall we in these days find our cloistered retreats to think out such ideals as may be applicable in our time and circumstances:  the needed kinetic ethics, the needed synthetic philosophy and science, the needed vision and imagery and expression of them all?

N—­THE EVILS OF THE CITY

Disease, defect, vice and crime

I have spoken little of town evils, and much of town ideals, primarily for the reason that even to recognise, much less treat, the abnormal, we must know something of the normal course of evolution.  Hence, the old and useful phrase by which physiology used to be known, that of “the institutes of medicine.”  Sociology has thus to become “the institutes of citizenship.”