Science and Citizenship
geographical science for the construction and criticism of civic policy is a manifest obligation, or, as it ought to be, a privilege and pleasure of the city fathers who are immediately responsible for civic policy, and of the body of citizens who are mediately responsible for the same. But are there not also whole bodies of the citizens into whose occupation and livelihood the application of geographical knowledge so largely enters that they might almost be called applied geographers? Is this not true of all those classes engaged in the organisation of facilities for travel and communication from the railway manager to the station porter, from the pilot to the bargeman, from the hotel-keeper to the cabman, from the road-surveyor to the crossing-sweeper? And in less degree is it not true likewise of the whole trading class, whose business consists in shifting goods from the place of growth and production to their destination in the hands of consumers? For all these, from the city father to the crossing-sweeper, the question is—Does each one utilise, to the fullest, such resources as contemporary geographical science can and should supply? The President of the Royal Geographical Society is the servant of the crossing-sweeper who has the knowledge and the imagination to use him.
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What are the resources of geographical science? Where are they to be found? How may the
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