by nobody, tolerated as a useful type in farce and provider of this world's daily bread.
It follows, however — and this is the most essential point of any — that we cannot comprehend political and economic history at all unless we realize that the city, with its gradual detachment from and final bankrupting of the country, is the determinative form to which the course and sense of higher history generally conforms. World history is city history.
An obvious case in point is, of course, the Classical world, in which the Euclidean feeling of existence connected the city-idea with its need of minimizing extension and thus, with ever-increasing emphasis, identified the State with the stone body of the individual Polis. But, quite apart from this instance, we find in every Culture (and very soon) the type of the capital city. This, as its name pointedly indicates, is that city whose spirit, with its methods, aims, and decisions of policy and economics, dominates the land. The lane with its people is for this controlling spirit a tool and an object. The land does not understand what is going on, and is not even asked. In all countries of all Late Cultures, the great parties, the revolutions, the Cæsarisms, the democracies, the parliaments, are the form in which the spirit of the capital tells the country what it is expected to desire and, if called upon, to die for. The Classical forum, the Western press, are, essentially, intellectual engines of the ruling City. Any country-dweller who really understands the meaning of politics in such periods, and feels himself on their level, moves into the City, not perhaps in the body, but certainly in the spirit.[1] The sentiment and public opinion of the peasant's country-side — so far as it can be said to exist — is prescribed and guided by the print and speech of the city. Egypt is Thebes, the orbis terrarum is Rome, Islam is Baghdad, France is Paris. The history of every springtime phase is played out in the many small centres of many separate districts. The Egyptian nomes, the Greek peoples of Homer, the Gothic counties and free cities, were the makers of history of old. But gradually Policy gathers itself up into a very few capitals, and everything else retains but a shadow of political existence. Even in the Classical world, the atomizing tendency towards city-states did not hold out against the major movement. As early as the Peloponnesian War it was only Athens and Sparta that were really handling policy, the remaining cities of the Ægean being merely elements within the hegemony of the one or the other; of policies of their own there is no
- ↑ The phenomenon is perhaps too well known in our days to need exemplification. But it is worth while recalling that the usual form of disgrace for a minister or courtier of the seventeenth or eighteenth century was to be commanded to "retire to his estates," and that a student expelled from the universities is said to be "rusticated." Since this volume was written, a remarkable proof of the reality of this spiritual indrawing by the Megalopolis has been given by the swift spread of radio broadcasting over the West-European and American world. For the country-dweller, radio reception means intimate touch with the news, the thought, and the entertainment of the great city, and relieves the grievance of "isolation" that the older countryfolk would never have felt as a grievance at all. — Tr.
