best [Page: 80] arguments of both progressive and
moderate parties in city politics.

Passing from Politics to Culture. Culture, the needs of this also become
clearer; each community developing a similar general series of culture
institutions, from the simplest presentation of its geography,
landscape and architecture, to the complex development of industrial,
technical and scientific instruction; and for provision also for the
institutions of custom and ethic in school, law, and church. Just as
place, occupation, and family are intimately connected in the practical
world, so their respective culture institutions must more and more be
viewed as a whole. Civic improvers will find their ideals more
realisable as they recognise the complex unity of the city as a social
development of which all the departments of action and thought are in
organic relation, be it of health or disease. The view of theoretic
civics as concrete sociology, and of practical civics as applied
sociology may be more simply expressed as the co-adjustment of social
survey and social service, now becoming recognised as rational, indeed
in many cities being begun.

I--DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOOL, AND ITS REACTION UPON TOWN

The reactions of the School upon the Town are observed in practice to be
of very different values;--how are these differences to be explained?

From the very first the school is essentially one of memory, the impress
of the town-life, even at its best and highest individual quality and
impressiveness, as in the work of a great master, the observation and
memory of which may long give his stamp to the work of his followers.
The fading of this into dullness, yet the fixing of it as a convention,
is familiar to all in arts and crafts, but is no less real in the
general lapse of appreciation of environment. Most serious of all is the
fixation of habit and custom, so that at length "custom lies upon us
with a weight heavy as death, and deep [Page 81] almost as life." This
continual fixation of fashionable standards as moral ones is thus a
prime explanation of each reformer's difficulty in making his moral
standard the fashionable one, and also, when his doctrine has succeeded,
of the loss of life and mummification of form which it so speedily
undergoes.

Of conventional "education," considered as the memorisation of past
records, however authoritative and classic, the decay is thus
intelligible and plain, and the repetition of criticism