Only a few years earlier, it was Chicago which, for New England no less than for the Old World, seemed but the byword of a hopelessly materialised community.  So Birmingham or Glasgow has won its present high position among cities in comparatively recent times; so it may now be the turn of older cities, once far more eminent, like Newcastle or Dundee, to overtake and in turn, perhaps, outstrip them.  But all this is still too general and needs further definition; let us attempt this, therefore, somewhat more fully, in the concrete case of Glasgow.

Q—­GLASGOW AS TYPICAL OF CIVIC TRANSITION—­FROM “PALEOTECHNIC” TO “NEOTECHNIC”

My own appreciation of the significance of Glasgow was first really awakened over twenty years ago by William Morris, who in his vivid way pointed out to me how, despite the traditional culture—­superiority of Edinburgh, Glasgow was not only the Scottish capital, but, in his view, in real progressiveness the leading and initiative city of the whole United Kingdom.  And this for him was not merely or mainly in its municipal enterprise, then merely in its infancy—­although he expressed this development in the phrase “In London, people talked socialism without living it; but in Glasgow, they were socialists without knowing it!” Despite all the ugliness which had so repelled Ruskin, the squalor which moved Matthew Arnold to the fiercest scorn in all his writings, Morris’s appreciation arose from his craftsman’s knowledge and respect for supreme craftsmanship.  The great ships building upon the Clyde were for him “the greatest achievement of [Page:  106] humanity since the days of the cathedral-builders,” nay, for him actually surpassing these, since calling forth an even more complex combination and “co-operation of all the material arts and sciences” into a mighty and organic whole; and correspondingly of all their respective workers also, this being for him of the very essence of his social ideal.

For these reasons he insisted, to my then surprise that the social reorganisation he then so ardently hoped for “was coming faster upon the Clyde than upon the Thames”:  he explained as for him the one main reason for his then discouragement as to the progress of London that there East and West, North and South, are not only too remote each from the other, but in their occupations all much too specialised—­there to finance, there to manufactures, or here to leisure, and so on; while on the Clyde industrial organisation and social progress could not but develop together, through the very nature of the essential and working unity of the ship.

Since Morris’s day, a local art movement, of which he knew little, has risen to eminence, a foreign critic would say to pre-eminence, in this country at least.  Since Ruskin’s savage response to a Glasgow invitation to lecture—­“first burn your city, and cleanse your river,”—­a new generation of architects and hygienists have not a little transformed the one, and vigorous measures