Society: Its Origin and Development Part 13

179. =How the City Grows.=--The city grows by the natural excess of births over deaths and by immigration. Without immigration the city grows more slowly but more wholesomely. Immigration introduces an alien element that has to adjust itself to new ways and does not always fuse readily with the native element. This is true of immigration from the country village as well as from a foreign country, but an American, even though brought up differently, finds it easier to adapt himself to his new environment. An increasingly large percentage of children are born and grow to maturity in the city.

There are thousands of urban communities of moderate size in America, where there are few who come in from any distance, but for nearly a hundred years in the older parts of the country a rural migration has been carrying young people into town, and the recent volume of foreign immigration is spilling over from the large cities into the smaller urban centres, so that the mixture of population is becoming general.

180. =The Attraction of the City.=--Foreign immigration is a subject that must be treated by itself; rural immigration needs no prolonged discussion once the present limitations of life in the country are understood. Mult.i.tudes of ambitious young people are not contented with the opportunities offered by the rural environment. They want to be at the strategic points of the world's activities, struggling for success in the thick of things. The city attracts the country boy who is ambitious, exactly as old Rome attracted the immature German. The blare of its noisy traffic, the glare of its myriad lights, the rush and the roar and the rabble all urge him to get into the scramble for fun and gain. The crowd attracts. The instinct of sociability draws people together. Those who are unfamiliar with rural s.p.a.ces and are accustomed to live in crowded tenements find it lonesome in the country, and prefer the discomfort of their congested quarters in town to the pure air and unspoiled beauty of the country. They love the stir of the streets, and enjoy sitting on the door-steps and wandering up and down the sidewalks, feeling the push of the motley crowd. Those who leave the country for the city feel all these attractions and are impelled by them, but beyond these attractions, re-enforcing them by an appeal to the intellect, are the economic advantages that lie in the numerous occupations and chances for promotion to high-salaried positions, the educational advantages for children and youth in the better-graded schools, the colleges, the libraries, and the other cultural inst.i.tutions, and such social advantages as variety of entertainment, modern conveniences in houses and hotels, more beautiful and up-to-date churches, well-equipped hospitals, and comfortable and convenient means of transportation from place to place.

181. =Making a Countryman into a Citizen.=--It is important to enter into the spirit of the young people who prefer the streets and blocks of the town to the winding country roads, and are willing to sacrifice what there is of beauty and leisure in rural life for the ugliness, sordidness, and continuous drive of the city; to understand that a greater driving force, stirring in the soul of youth and thrusting upon him with every item of news from the city, is impelling him to disdain what the country can give him and to magnify the counter-attractions of the town. He has felt the monotony and the contracted opportunity of farm life as he knows it. He has experienced the drudgery of it ever since he began to do the ch.o.r.es. Familiar only with the methods of his ancestors, he knows that labor is hard and returns are few. He may look across broad acres that will some day be his, but he knows that his father is "land poor." As a farmer he sees no future for agriculture. He has known the village and the surrounding country ever since he graduated from the farmyard to the schoolhouse, and came into a.s.sociation with the boys and girls of the neighborhood. He knows the economic and social resources of the community and is satisfied that he can never hope for much enjoyment or profit in the limited rural environment. The school gave him little mental stimulus, but opened the door ajar into a larger world. The church gave him an orthodox gospel in terms of divinity and its environment rather than humanity on earth, but stirred vaguely his aspirations for a fuller life. He has sounded the depths of rural existence and found it unsatisfying. He wants to learn more, to do more, to be more.

One eventful day he graduates from the village to the city, as years before he graduated from the home into the community. By boat or train, or by the more primitive method of stage-coach or afoot, he travels until he joins the surging crowd that swarms in the streets.

He feels himself thrilling with the consciousness that he is moving toward success and possibly greatness. He does not stop to think that hundreds of those who seek their fortune in the city have failed, and have found themselves far worse off than the contented folk back in the home village. The newcomer establishes himself in a boarding-house or lodging-house which hundreds of others accept as an apology for a home, joins the mult.i.tude of unemployed in a search for work, and is happy if he finds it in an office that is smaller and darker than the wood-shed on the farm, or behind a counter where fresh air and sunlight never penetrate. He will put up with these non-essentials, for he expects in days ahead to move higher up, when the large rewards that are worth while will be his.

In the ranks of business he measures his wits with others of his kind.

He apes their manners, their slang, and their tone inflections. He imitates their fashions in clothes, learns the popular dishes in the restaurants, and if of feminine tastes gives up pie for salad. He goes home after hours to his small and dingy bedroom, tired from the drain upon his vitality because of ill-ventilated rooms and ill-nourishing food, but happy and free. There are no ch.o.r.es waiting for him now, and there is somewhere to go for entertainment. Not far away he may have his choice of theatres and moving-picture shows. If he is aesthetically or intellectually inclined, there are art-galleries and libraries beckoning him. If his earnings are a pittance and he cannot afford the theatre, and if his tastes do not draw him to library or museum, the saloon-keeper is always ready to be his friend. The youth from the country would be welcomed at the Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation on the other side of the city, or at a church if there happened to be a social or religious function that opened the building, but the saloon is always near, always open, and always cordial. Poor or rich, or a stranger, it matters not, let him enter and enjoy the poor man's club.

It is warm and pleasant there and he will soon make friends.

182. =Mental and Moral Changes.=--The readjustments that are necessary in the transfer from country to city are not accomplished without considerable mental and moral shock. Changing habits of living are paralleled by changing habits of thought. Old ideas are jostled by new every hour of the day. At the table, on the street, in office or store, at the theatre or church the currents of thought are different.

Social contacts are more numerous, relations are more shifting, intellectual affinities and repulsions are felt constantly; mental interactions are so frequent that stability of beliefs and independence of thought give way to flexibility and uncertainty and openness to impression. Group influence a.s.serts its power over the individual.

Along with the influence of the group mind goes the influence of what may be called the electrical atmosphere of the city. The newcomer from the country is very conscious of it; to the old resident it becomes second nature. City life is noisy. The whole industrial system is athrob with energy. The purring of machinery, the rattle and roar of traffic, the clack and toot of the automobile, the clanging of bells, and the chatter of human tongues create a babel that confuses and tires the unsophisticated ear and brain. They become accustomed to the sounds after a time, but the noise registers itself continually on the sensitive nervous system, and many a man and woman breaks at last under the strain. Another element that adds to the nervous strain is haste. Life in the city is a stern chase after money and pleasure.

Everybody hurries from morning until night, for everything moves on schedule, and twenty-four hours seem not long enough to do the world's work and enjoy the world's fun. Noise and hurry furnish a mental tension that charges the urban atmosphere with excitement. Purveyors of news and amus.e.m.e.nt have learned to cater to the love of excitement.

The newspaper editor hunts continually for sensations, and sometimes does not scruple to twist sober fact into stirring fiction. The book-stall and the circulating library supply the novel and the cheap magazine to give smack to the jaded palate that cannot relish good literature. The theatre panders to the appet.i.te for a thrill.

In these circ.u.mstances lie the possibilities of moral shock. In the city there is freedom from the old restraint that the country community imposed. In the city the countryman finds that he can do as he pleases without the neighbors shaking their heads over him. In the absence of such restraint and with the social contact of new friends he may rapidly lower his moral standards as he changes his manners and his mental habits. It does not take long to shuffle off the old ways; it does not take much push or pull to make the unsophisticated boy or girl lose balance and drift toward lower ideals than those with which they came. Not a few find it hard to keep the moral poise in the whirlpool of mental distraction. It is these effects of the urban environment that help to explain the social derelicts that abound in the cities. It is the weakness of human nature, along with the economic pressure, that accounts for the drunkenness, vice, and crime that const.i.tute so large a problem of city life and block the path of society's development. They are a part of the imperfection that is characteristic of this stage of human progress, and especially of the twentieth-century city. They are not incurable evils, they demand a remedy, and they furnish an inspiring object of study for the pract.i.tioner of social disease.

He who escapes business and moral failure has open wide before him in the city the door of opportunity. He may, if he will, meet all the world and his wife in places where the people gather, touching elbows with individuals from every quarter of the country, with persons of every cla.s.s and variety of attainment, with believers of every political, aesthetic, and religious creed. In such an atmosphere his mind expands like the exotic plant in a conservatory. His individual prejudices fall from him like worn-out leaves from the trees. He begins to realize that other people have good grounds for their opinions and practices that differ from his own, and that in most cases they are better than his, and he quickly adjusts himself to them. The city stimulates life by its greater social resources, and forms within its borders more highly developed human groups. Beyond the material comforts and luxuries that the city supplies are the social values that it creates in the a.s.sociations and organizations of men and women allied for the philanthropic, remedial, and constructive purposes that are looking forward to the slow progress of mankind toward its highest ideals.

183. =The City as a Social Centre.=--The city is an epitome of national and even world life, as the farm is community life in miniature. Its social life is infinitely complex, as compared with the rural village. Distances that stretch out for miles in the country, over fields and woods and hills, are measured in the city by blocks of dwellings and public buildings, with intersecting streets, stretching away over a level area as far as the eye can see. Social inst.i.tutions correspond to the needs of the inhabitants, and while there are a few like those in the country, because certain human needs are the same, there is a much larger variety in the city because of the great number of people of different sorts and the complexity of their demands.

Every city has its business centres for finance, for wholesale trade, and for retail exchange, its centres for government, and for manufacturing; it has its railroad terminals and often its wharves and shipping, its libraries, museums, schools, and churches. All these are gathering places for groups of people. But there is no one social centre for all cla.s.ses; rather, the people of the city are a.s.sociated in an infinite number of large and small groups, according to the mutual interests of their members. But if the city has no four corners, it is itself a centre for a large district of country. As the village is the nucleus that binds together outlying farms and hamlets, so the city has far-flung connections with rural villages and small towns in a radius of many miles.

184. =The Importance of the City.=--The city has grown up because it was located conveniently for carrying on manufacturing and trade on a large scale. It is growing in importance because this is primarily an industrial age. Its population is increasing relatively to the rural population, and certain cities are growing enormously, in spite of Mr.

Bryce's warning that it is unfortunate for any city to grow beyond a population of one hundred thousand. The importance of the city as a social centre is apparent when we remember that in America, according to the census of 1910, 46.3 per cent of the people live in communities of more than 2,500 population, while 31 per cent of the whole are inhabitants of cities of 25,000 or more population. When nearly one-third of all the people of the nation live in communities of such size, the large city becomes a type of social centre of great significance. At the prevailing rate of growth a majority of the American people will soon be dwelling in cities, and there seems to be no reason to expect a reversal of tendency because modern invention is making it possible for fewer persons on the farm to supply the agricultural products that city people need. This means, of course, that the temper and outlook of mind will be increasingly urban, that social inst.i.tutions generally will have the characteristics of the city, that the National Government will be controlled by that part of the American citizens that so far has been least successful in governing itself well.

185. =Munic.i.p.al History.=--The city has come to stay, and there is in it much of good. It has come into existence to satisfy human need, and while it may change in character it is not likely to be less important than now. Its history reveals its reasons for existence and indicates the probabilities of its future. The ancient city was an overgrown village that had special advantages for communication and transportation of goods, or that was located conveniently for protection against neighboring enemies. The cities of Greece maintained their independence as political units, but most social centres that at first were autonomous became parts of a larger state.

The great cities were the capitals of nations or empires, and to strike at them in war was to aim at the vitals of an organism. Such were Thebes and Memphis in Egypt, Babylon and Nineveh in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, Carthage and Rome in the West. Such are Vienna and Berlin, Paris and London to-day. Lesser cities were centres of trade, like Corinth or Byzantium, or of culture, such as Athens.

Such was Florence in the Middle Ages, and such are Liverpool and Leipzig to-day. The munic.i.p.alities of the Roman Empire marked the climax of civic development in antiquity.

The social and industrial life of the Middle Ages was rural. Only a few cities survived the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, and new centres of importance did not arise until trade revived and the manufacturing industry began to concentrate in growing towns about the time of the Crusades. Then artisans and tradesmen found their way to points convenient to travel and trade, and a city population began the processes of aggregation and congregation. They grew up rough in manners and careless of sanitation and hygiene, but they developed efficiency in local government and an inclination to demand civic rights from those who had any outside claim of control; they began to take pride in their public halls and churches, and presently they founded schools and universities. Wealth increased rapidly, and some of the cities, like the Hansa towns of the north, and Venice and Genoa in the south, commanded extensive and profitable trade routes.

Modern cities owe their growth to the industrial revolution and the consequent increase of commerce. The industrial centres of northern England are an ill.u.s.tration of the way in which economic forces have worked in the building of cities. At the middle of the eighteenth century that part of Great Britain was far less populous and progressive than the eastern and southern counties. It had small representation in Parliament. It was provincial in thought, speech, and habits. It was given over to agriculture, small trade, and rude home manufacture. Presently came the revolutionary inventions of textile machinery, of the steam-engine, and of processes for extracting and utilizing coal and iron. The heavy, costly machinery required capital and the factory. Concentrated capital and machinery required workers. The working people were forced to give up their small home manufacturing and their unprofitable farming and move to the industrial barracks and workrooms of the manufacturing centres.

These centres sprang up where the tools were most easily and cheaply obtained, and where lay the coal-beds and the iron ore to be worked over into machinery. From Newcastle on the east, through Sheffield, Leeds, Birmingham, and Manchester, to Liverpool on the west and Glasgow over the Scottish border grew up a chain of thriving cities, and later their people were given the ballot that was taken from certain of the depopulated rural villages. These cities have obtained a voice of power in the councils of the nation. In America the industrial era came somewhat later, but the same process of centralizing industry went on at the waterfalls of Eastern rivers, at railroad centres, and at ocean, lake, and Gulf ports. Commerce has accelerated the growth of many of these manufacturing towns. Increase of industry and population has been especially rapid in the great ports that front the two oceans, through whose gates pour the floods of immigrants, and in the interior cities like Chicago, that lie at especially favorable points for railway, lake, or river traffic. As in the Middle Ages, universities grew because teachers went where students were gathered, and students were attracted to the place where teachers were to be found, so in the larger cities the more people there are and the more numerous is the population, the greater the amount of business. It pays to be near the centre of things.

READING REFERENCES

HOWE: _The Modern City and Its Problems_, pages 9-49.

GILLETTE: _Constructive Rural Sociology_, pages 32-46.

STRONG: _Our World_, pages 228-283.

NEARING AND WATSON: _Economics_, pages 123-132.

GIRY AND REVILLE: _Emanc.i.p.ation of the Mediaeval Towns._

BLISS: _New Encyclopedia of Social Reform_, art. "Cities."

CHAPTER XXVI

THE MANUFACTURING ENTERPRISE

186. =Preponderance of Economic Interests.=--Such a social centre as the city has several functions to perform for its inhabitants. Though primarily concerned with business, the people have other interests to be conserved; the city, therefore, has governmental, educational, and recreational functions as a social organization, and within its limits all kinds of human concerns find their sponsors and supporters.

Unquestionably, the economic interests are preponderant. On the principle that social structure corresponds to function, the structure of the city lends itself to the performance of the economic function.

Business streets are the princ.i.p.al thoroughfares. Districts near the great factories are crowded with the tenements that shelter the workers. Little room is left for breathing-places in town, and little leisure in which to breathe. Government is usually in the hands of professional politicians who are too willing to take their orders from the cohort captains of business. Morals, aesthetics, and recreation are all subordinate to business. Even religion is mainly an affair of Sunday, and appears to be of relatively small consequence compared with business or recreation. The great problems of the city are consequently economic at bottom. Poverty and misery, drunkenness, unemployment, and crime are all traceable in part, at least, to economic deficiency. Economic readjustments const.i.tute the crying need of the twentieth-century city.

187. =The Manufacturing Industry.=--It is the function of the agriculturist and the herdsman, the miner and the lumberman, to produce the raw material. The sailor and the train-hand, the longsh.o.r.eman and the teamster, transport them to the industrial centres. It is the business of the manufacturer and his employees to turn them into the finished product for the use of society.

Manufacturing is the leading occupation in thousands of busy towns and small cities of all the industrial nations of western Europe and America, and shares with commerce and trade as a leading enterprise in the cosmopolitan centres. The merchant or financier who thinks his type of emporium or exchange is the only munic.i.p.al centre of consequence, needs only to mount to the top of a tall building or climb a suburban hill where he can look off over the city and see the many smoking chimneys, to realize the importance of the factory. With thousands of tenement-house dwellers it is as natural to fall into the occupation of a factory hand as in the rural regions for the youth to become a farmer. The growing child who leaves school to help support the family has never learned a craftsman's trade, but he may find a subordinate place among the mill or factory hands until he gains enough skill to handle a machine. From that time until age compels him to join the ranks of the unemployed he is bound to his machine, as firmly as the mediaeval serf was bound to the soil. Theoretically he is free to sell his labor in the highest market and to cross the continent if he will, but actually he is the slave of his employer, for he and his family are dependent upon his daily wage, and he cannot afford to lose that wage in order to make inquiries about the labor market elsewhere. Theoretically he is a citizen possessed of the franchise and equal in privilege and importance to his employer as a member of society, but actually he must vote for the party or the man who is most likely to benefit him economically, and he knows that he occupies a position of far less importance politically and socially than his employer. Employment is an essential in making a living, but it is an instrument that cuts two ways--it establishes an aristocracy of wealth and privilege for the employer and a servile cla.s.s of employees who often are little better than peasants of the belt and wheel.

188. =History of Manufacturing.=--The history of the manufacturing industry is a curious succession of enslavement and emanc.i.p.ation.

Until within a century and a half it was closely connected with the home. Primitive women fashioned the utensils and clothing of the primitive family, and when slaves were introduced into the household it became their task to perform those functions. The slave was a bondman. Neither his person nor his time was his own, and he could not hold property; but he was taken care of, fed and clothed and housed, and by a humane master was kindly treated and even made a friend. When the slave became a serf on the manorial estate of mediaeval Europe, manufacturing was still a household employment and old methods were still in use. These sufficed, as there was little outside demand from potential buyers, due to general poverty and lack of the means of exchange and transportation. Certain industries became localized, like the forging of iron instruments at the smithy and the grinding of grain at the mill, and the monastery buildings included apartments for various kinds of handicraft, but the factory was not yet. Then artisans found their way to the town, a.s.sociated themselves with others of their craft, and accepted the relation of journeyman in the employ of a master workman; there, too, the young apprentice learned his trade without remuneration. The group was a small one. For greater strength in local rivalries they organized craft guilds or a.s.sociations, and established over all members convenient rules and restrictions. Increasing opportunities for exchange of goods stimulated production, but the output of hand labor was limited in amount. The position of the craftsman locally was increasingly important, and his fortunes were improving. The craft guilds successfully disputed with their rivals for a share in the government of the city; there was democracy in the guild, for master and journeyman were both included, and they had interests much in common.

A journeyman confidently expected to become a master in a workshop of his own.

189. =Alteration of Status.=--Under the factory system the employee becomes one of many industrial units, having no social or guild relation to his employer, receiving a money wage as a quit claim from his employer, and dependent upon himself for labor and a living. For a time after the factory system came into vogue there were small shops where the employer busied himself among his men and personally superintended them, but the large factory tends to displace the small workshop, the corporation takes the place of the individual employer, and the employee becomes as impersonal a cog in the labor system as is any part of the machine at which he works. It used to be the case that a thrifty workman might hope to become in the future an employer, but now he has become a permanent member of a distinct cla.s.s, for the large capital required for manufacturing is beyond his reach. The manufacturing industry is continually pa.s.sing under the management of fewer individuals, while the number of operatives in each factory tends to increase. With concentration of management goes concentration of wealth, and the gap widens between rich and poor. Out of the modern factory system has come the industrial problem with all its varieties of skilled and unskilled work, woman and child labor, sweating, wages, hours and conditions of labor, unemployment, and other difficulties.

190. =The Working Grind.=--There are many manufacturing towns and small cities that are built on one industry. Thousands of workers, young and old, answer the morning summons of the whistle and pour into the factory for a day's labor at the machine. A brief recess at noon and the work is renewed for the second half of the day. Weary at night, the workers tramp home to the tenements, or hang to the trolley strap that is the symbol of the five-cent commuter, and recuperate for the next day's toil. They are cogs in the great wheel of industry, units in the great sum of human energy, indispensable elements in the progress of economic success. Sometimes they seem less prized than the costly machines at which they work, sometimes they fall exhausted in the ranks, as the soldier in the trenches drops under the attack, but they are absolutely essential to wealth and they are learning that they are indispensable to one another. In the development of social organization the working people are gaining a larger part. The factory is educating them to a consciousness of the solidarity of their cla.s.s interests. All cla.s.s organizations have their faults, but they teach their members group values and the dependence of the individual on his fellows.

191. =The Benefits of the New Industry to the Workers.=--It must not be supposed that the industrial revolution and the age of machinery have been a social misfortune. The benefits that have come to the laboring people, as well as to their employers, must be put into the balance against the evils. There is first of all the great increase of manufactured products that have been shared in by the workers and the greatly reduced price of many necessaries of life, such as matches, pins, and cooking utensils. Invention has eased many kinds of labor and taken them away from the overburdened housewife, and new machinery is constantly lightening the burden of the farm and the home.

Invention has broadened the scope of labor, opening continually new avenues to the workers. It is difficult to see how the rapidly increasing number of people in the United States could have found employment without the typewriter, the automobile, and the numerous varieties of electrical application. The great number of modern conveniences that have come to be regarded as necessaries even in the homes of the working people, and the local improvements in streets and sidewalks, schools and playgrounds that are possible because of increasing wealth, are all due to the new type of industry.

Conditions of labor are better. Where building laws are in force, factories are lighter, cleaner, and better ventilated than were the houses and shops of the pre-factory age, and the hours of labor that are necessary to earn a living have been greatly reduced in most industries. There have been mental and moral gains, also. It requires mental application to handle machinery. An uneducated immigrant may soon learn to handle a simple machine, but the complicated machinery that the better-paid workmen tend requires intelligence, care, and sobriety. The age of machinery has brought with it emanc.i.p.ation from slavery, indenture, and imprisonment for debt, and has made possible a new status for the worker and his children. The laborer in America is a citizen with a vote and a right to his own opinion equal to that of his employer; he has time and money enough to buy and read the newspaper; and he is encouraged and helped to educate his children and to prepare them for a place in the sun that is ampler than his own.

READING REFERENCES

CHEYNEY: _Industrial and Social History of England_, pages 199-239.

NEARING AND WATSON: _Economics_, pages 206-212, 256-266.

HENDERSON: _Social Elements_, pages 143-156.

ADAMS AND SUMNER: _Labor Problems_, pages 3-15.

BOGART: _Economic History of the United States_, pages 130-169, 356-399.