Science and Citizenship
belong, in the eyes of the comparative psychologist, to the folklore of the country. In short, they are pre-scientific. In England, the legal definition of a City is, as every one knows, a place which is or has been the seat of a bishopric. In other words, a City is essentially a cathedral city. To this we must return later, merely noting it now as for the sociologist a great "pointer fact," in the phrase of Tylor, In the United States of America, the conception of a City is, in appearance at least, of a more material kind. In that country there is no lack of resources of observation, for it is a place where a crop of new cities is grown annually. The process of city making may be seen as a matter of almost daily observation in new and rapidly developing states of the Union, like Oklahoma and Alaska.
VI
There is perhaps no more representative type of American civilisation, and also, therefore, of the dominant phase of the contemporary western world, than the American railway engineer. He is the true Viking of the times, and is already on the way to plant his forges, and open his lines of communication all round the margin of the Pacific Ocean. What is the conception of a city in the mind of the American engineer? Direct items of evidence may be gathered from almost any of the innumerable reports on new railway enterprises, which are common documents, not
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