hedral or its forum. The processes of our
industries, in what is now their daily artisan routine, include, repeat,
condense, what were yesterday or longer ago living inventions, each
instinct with Promethean fire. The hackneyed ornament of our homes was
once glowing with beauty, radiant or dark with symbolism. So it is for
our everyday customs and institutions, and so for living languages; our
own, perhaps, most of all. These, of course, are facts made familiar by
investigators of all orders, from the scholar and antiquary of old, the
historian and philologist of yesterday, to the geographer or the
sociologist of our own time: witness Mr. Spencer's masterly treatment of
their main results. How, then, shall we correlate this process of all
things growing old with the analysis of cities above attempted? In other
words, how shall we interpret the course of their historic evolution,
their renewed growth and decay, progress and degeneracy, their present
condition, crowded with residues of the past, with those potentialities
which our outline discloses? This is the more necessary since this
fourfold analysis applies in principle to all human groupings from the
simplest village to the Eternal City. To this, indeed, we have in
principle already traced it, onwards from our primitive valley section
with its humble hamlets, its fundamental occupations. Returning then to
our main diagram, with its four-fold analysis of the City so soon as we
have completed this, and [Page: 94] carried its progress up to the level
of city life proper, we must next turn over the leaf and begin a new
page, with place and work and folk once more. This simplest of acts
expresses with graphic significance the very process of history; for in
closing our diagram page its "Cloister" has been folded down on the
"School," our cathedral and forum, 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