The Modern City

With all this, there was about the great cities of the Middle Ages a noble spirit of civic life and energy, an ever-present love of Art, a zeal for good work as good work, and a deep under-lying sense of social duty and personal faithfulness. A real and sacred bond held the master and his apprentices together, the master workman to his men, the craftsman to his gild-brethren, the gild- men in the mass as a great aggregate corporation. Each burgher’s house was his factory and workshop, each house, each parish, each gild, each town had its own patron saint, its own special church, its own feudal patron, its corporate life, its own privileges, traditions, and emblems.

Thus grew up for the whole range of the artificer’s life, for the civic life, for the commercial life, a profound sense of consecrated rule which amounted to a kind of religion of Industry, a sort of patriotism of Industry, an Art of Industry, the like of which has never existed before or since. It was in ideal and in aim (though alas! not often in fact) the highest form of secular life that human society has yet reached. It rested ultimately, though somewhat vaguely, on religious Duty. And it produced a sense of mutual obligation between master and man, employer and employed, old and young, rich and poor, wise and ignorant. To restore the place of this sense of social obligation in Industry, the world has been seeking and experimenting now for these four centuries past adventure balkan tours.

The Modern City

It is needless to describe the modern city: we all know what it is, some of us too well. The first great fact about the Modern City is that it is in a far lower stage of organic life. It is almost entirely bereft of any religious, patriotic, or artistic character as a whole. There is in modern cities a great deal of active religious life, much public spirit, in certain parts a love of beauty, taste, and cultivation of a special kind. But it is not embodied in the city; it is not associated with the city; it does not radiate from the city. The Modern City is ever changing, loose in its organization, casual in its form. It grows up, or extends suddenly, no man knows how, in a single generation — in America in a single decade. Its denizens come and go, pass on, changing every few years and even months. Few families have lived in the same city for three successive generations. An Athenian, Syracusan, Roman family had dwelt in their city for twenty generations.

A typical industrial city of modern times has no founder, no traditional heroes, no patrons or saints, no emblem, no .history, no definite circuit. In a century, it changes its population over and over again, and takes on two or three different forms. In ten or twenty years it evolves a vast new suburb, a mere wen of bricks or stone, with no god or demi-god for its founder, but a speculative builder, a syndi-cate or a railway. The speculative builder or the company want a quick return for their money. The new suburb is occupied by people who are so busy, and in such a hurry to get to work, that in taking a house, their sole inquiry is — how near is it to the station, or where the tram-car puts you down.