vacant shells of past art, of which
now only the student cares to trace the objective annals, much less
penetrate to the inner history. So for the decayed Renaissance learning
of our schools, for the most part so literally dead since the
"Grammarian's Funeral"; and so, too, for the unthinking routines, the
dead customs and conventions, and largely too the laws and rituals of
our urban lives. Hence, then, it is that for the arrest and the decay of
cities we have no need to go for our examples to the ancient East. These
processes, like those of individual senility and death, are going on
everywhere day by day.

Upon the new page, then, it is but a complexer "Town" and "School" anew:
we have no continuing City. This too commonly has existed at its best
but for the rare generation which created it, or little longer; though
its historic glories, like those of sunset and of after-glow, may long
shed radiance and glamour upon its town, and linger in the world's
memory long after not only these have faded, but their very folk have
vanished, their walls fallen, nay their very site been buried or
forgotten. Upon all these degrees of dying, all these faint and fading
steps between immortality and oblivion, we may arrange what we call our
historic cities. Obviously in the [Page: 95] deeper and more living
sense the city exists only in actualising itself; and thus to us it is
that the ideal city lies ever in the future. Yet it is the very essence
of this whole argument that an ideal city is latent in every town. Where
shall we in these days find our cloistered retreats to think out such
ideals as may be applicable in our time and circumstances: the needed
kinetic ethics, the needed synthetic philosophy and science, the needed
vision and imagery and expression of them all?

N--THE EVILS OF THE CITY

Disease, defect, vice and crime

I have spoken little of town evils, and much of town ideals, primarily
for the reason that even to recognise, much less treat, the abnormal, we
must know something of the normal course of evolution. Hence, the old
and useful phrase by which physiology used to be known, that of "the
institutes of medicine." Sociology has thus to become "the institutes of
citizenship."

Often though philanthropists forget this, diagnosis should precede
treatment. The evils of the city, by the very nature of our hypothesis,
demand special survey, and this no less thoroughly than do the normal
place and work and indust