onal council his
line of action, conscious or unconscious, remains congruent with these.
Representative government fails to yield all that its inventors hoped of
it, simply because it is so tolerably representative of its majorities;
and there is thus great truth in the common consolation that our
municipal governments, like larger ones, are seldom much worse than we
deserve. Each social formation, through each of its material activities,
exerts its influence upon the civic whole; and each of its ideas and
ideals wins also its place and power. At one time the legal and
punitive point of view, directing itself mainly to individual cases, or
the philanthropic, palliating sufferings, dispute the foremost places;
and now in their turn hygienic or educational endeavours arise, towards
treating causes instead of waiting for consequences. Such endeavours are
still undeniably too vague in thought, too crude in practice, and the
enthusiast of hygiene or education or temperance may have much to answer
for. But so, also, has he who stands outside of the actual civic field,
whether as philistine or aesthete, utopist or cynic, party politician or
"mug-wump." Between all these extremes it is for the united forces of
civic survey and civic service to find the middle course. [Page: 114] We
observe then in the actual city, as among its future citizens, that our
action is generally the attempt to mould both alike to some past or
passing social formation, and, therefore, usually towards the type to
which our interest and our survey incline, be this in our own city or
more probably in some earlier one. Even in the actual passing detail of
party politics we are often reminded how directly continuous are the
rivals with puritan London, with royalist Oxford; but still more is this
the case throughout the history of thought and action, and the intenser
the more plainly; for it is in his highest moments of conviction and
decision that the Puritan feels most in sympathy with the law or the
prophets of Jerusalem, the scholar with Athens; or that the man of
action--be he the first French republican or the latest
imperialist--most frankly draws his inspiration from the corresponding
developments of Paris. It is a commonplace of psychology that our
thought is and must be anthropomorphic; a commonplace of history that it
has been Hebraomorphic, Hellenomorphic, Latinomorphic, and so on by
turns.

This view has often been well worked out by the histori