public opinion and street railways, the individual man and the tools that he uses, as something more than a mere collective entity. We may think of it as a mechanism—a psychophysical mechanism—in and through which private and political interests find corporate expression. Much of what we ordinarily regard as the city—its charters, formal organization, buildings, street railways, and so forth—is, or seems to be, mere artifact. However, it is only when and in so far as these things, through use and wont, connect themselves, like a tool in the hand of a man, with the vital forces resident in individuals and in the community that they assume the institutional form. As the whole the city is a growth. It is the undesigned product of the labors of successive generations of men.
I. THE CITY PLAN AND LOCAL ORGANIZATION
The city, particularly the modern American city, strikes one at first blush as so little a product of the artless processes of nature and growth that it is difficult to recognize its institutional character. The ground plan of most American cities, for example, is a checkerboard. The unit of distance is the block. This geometrical form suggests that the city is a purely artificial construction, which might conceivably be taken apart and put together again, like a house of blocks.
The fact is, however, that the city is rooted in the habits and customs of the people who inhabit it. The consequence is that the city possesses a moral as well as a physical organization, and these two mutually interact in characteristic ways to mold and modify one another. It is the structure of the city which impresses us by its visible vastness and complexity, but this structure has its basis, nevertheless, in human nature, of which it is an expression. On the other hand, this vast organization which has arisen in response to the needs of its inhabitants, once formed, impresses itself upon them as a crude external fact, and forms them, in turn, in accordance with the design and interests which it incorporates.
The city plan.—It is because the city has what has here been described as its institutional character that there is a limit to the arbitrary modifications which it is possible to make in its physical structure and its moral order.
