interest are of naturalistic character. Even local history, though frequently linking up with archeology and something of the dignity of the geologic past, is but rarely understood as the actual root stock of contemporary growths, still less as the very seed-field of social inheritances, which may be latent or reappear in a new generation, and this for good or evil, much as do organic ones.

Our old city had no lack of historic memories, though these were too little taught us. We knew indeed something of its Roman origins, and a story of Danish invasion and defeat. But for Scottish boys Edward I, Wallace and Bruce are the first really vivid historic personages, and too often the last. Sir Walter's "Fair Maid of Perth," however, has spread its romantic interest over the essential points of his story. The old city had been the capital of Scotland until the murder of King James I caused its removal to Edinburgh; after which, save for the Gowrie conspiracy, which every history of James VI and I makes so familiar, our annals practically ended. The great medieval church, partitioned since Reformation days into three sufficient parish ones, had lost meaning and interest beyond these; Greyfriars or Blackfriars were but street names, and so on; we supposed, as people do still "for practical purposes," that all this old history was dead. What has this modern county town, with its active agricultural interests and markets, its special industries, of dyeing for the most part, and its large through railway traffic, to do with its ancient history?

If, however, the reader will turn to any history, or even guidebook, of London, he may vividly see the Celtic dun or hill-fort succeeded by the Roman altar, this by the Christian church and at length by St. Paul's Cathedral, in its Medieval and its Renaissance forms; and then unmistakably to its modern uses and disuses. Similarly he may read of Westminster as the lowest Thames ford, the primitive trade-crossing, therefore, before it became a monkish isle, or this a royal palace. He will see how the building of London Bridge downstream necessarily drew off to it all the crossing trade and kept for it all the shipping; and so he will realize more clearly the specializing of Westminster as legislative and administrative capital of empire, and as spiritual center of yet wider appeal, as compared with the growth of London, still as of old the mercantile and financial city. Similarly if we motor out to see the country, our chauffeur will guide us along ancient roads and hunting parks

and over prehistoric commons. Now if such geographic and historic conditions of the remotest past have plainly determined, and thus still determine, this vastest and in some ways most complex and heterogeneous of human aggregates, and this in such detail that Londonography has its innumerable monographs and libraries, its societies, its lectures by the dozen, should not these geographic and historic factors be even more obvious in less grown and less modified cities? So it is when we return from Thames to Tay.

Above the bridge of Perth it is a short and easy hour's walk to the old ford of Scone, with its once royal palace hard by. Its abbey has vanished, but its ancient crowning stone, removed at the brief conquest of Edward I to Westminster, lies, as every visitor to the abbey knows, in the coronation chair; and thus not only came to mark the difference between the pacific and mutually respecting union of Scotland with England and her tragic relations to Ireland, but potently helped the Scot to accept this pacific union.

In a word, then, Thamesford and Thamesbridge, Tayford and Taybridge have become Westminster and London, Scone and Perth. These parallel origins have stamped upon all these their respective and broadly parallel histories; and with these, and here is the relevancy of all this discussion, their respective social functions and character, their psychology also. In a word, then, the qualities and the defects of each community are to be judged, not simply by a contemporary survey, but primarily by a geographic and historic one. For lack of this it is that Mr. Booth's vastest of civic monographs-his "Life and Labour of the People of London"despite its admirable intention and spirit, its manifold collaboration, its accurate and laborious detail, its mapping of every house, has thrown after all so little light upon the foggy labyrinth.

II.

We now once more for a moment return to Perth; and there, hard by the modern railway station, we find the Roman "Pomarium," still a street name. We even see near by the apple-trees, and this no mere coincidence, for the row of houses where they most abound still keeps, some say since medieval times, its appropriate name of "Paradise!" But instead of going on here to further knowledge of the mingled good and evil which this modern town inherits from its environment and life-conduct in the past, let us rather select the

more difficult but more important case of the larger industrial city. For this purpose I can choose none more characteristic or more convenient than the seaport of the lower Tay, Dundee, whose rise in manufactures and population, as it became specialized as the central world market of jute industries throughout the past generation, is not only within its own living memory, but historically arose from a definite consequence of the American Civil War, with the resultant scarcity of cotton, and the vast market for jute which was thus opened. In any survey of the social condition of Dundee this staple industry is therefore the central problem-what need of going further back? What can local geography and history have to say to these present conditions, of an industry which brings its material from India and sends its product everywhere, from China to Peru? The social evils of the town are neither few nor small, in fact it has a tragic pre-eminence alike amongst Scottish cities and manufacturing ones generally. Of all industrial towns it has the largest proportion of working women and children and the smallest of working men. With this it has also the utmost irregularity of employment, since good times or bad throughout the world must swiftly react upon the length of jute required to pack or bag its varying quantity of production. To all these miseries add the evergrowing competition of Calcutta, where Dundee capital, machinery and skill have long been building up an increasingly formidable rivalry. So now Dundee unmistakably shows the dramatic point in the whole occidental world, where oriental competition is telling most heavily, and to which, therefore, the attention of economists and of statesmen, were these as yet adequately awake to such local problems, and to their importance as clues to more general developments, might with advantage be much more thoroughly directed. Assuming such economists, such statesmen to arise, and to grapple with these industrial and commercial problems, how impatient would they not be of the mere student of local geography and history, still more if he should venture to tell them, even after their Jute Trade Commission, that they were still largely failing to interpret the situation, failing correspondingly, too, to see the full possibilities of treatment of it, and all this for lack of inquiries into conditions far earlier than the present industrial ones, overpoweringly predominant though these now are? Yet if the gentle reader will again glance at his atlas and gazetteer, and look at our maritime situation

upon one of the few great fiords of the east coast, he will see that beyond this maritime situation it has grave disadvantages, some past and some present.

The river has a bar, while the open Forth is near. Fife, too, had its many ports, and Perth its own shipping; Montrose and Aberdeen were not far away, and even the inland agricultural valley of Strathmore is no true hinterland, but separated by a range of hills even now but little traversed. It is plainly a place, therefore, which has long had to accustom itself to distant markets, to emigration also.

With these disadvantages, however, have been associated an old excellence in shipbuilding,' which has been very naturally shared with Aberdeen; so that from these two towns, especially until the days of steam and iron, there came those famous tea-clippers of the British trade with Canton, whose annual race home with the best of the new season's crop was long one of the most notable events of the London commercial world, since combining business, speculation and sport in a way dear to the Englishman. It is thus a case of that social filiation we are tracing that our best known British yachtsman, whose endeavors to recover the international championship have so often brought his name before Americans should be a leading tea merchant of Glasgow and London. The widespread deterioration of business into sport, and often into gambling might also be considered here.

But as the yacht is of to-day so was the tea-clipper but of yesterday and we must now go back to an older and slower, but not less seaworthy type of craft, the old-fashioned whaler, whose annual voyage to the Arctic seas is still characteristic of Dundee, though now only a single ship may go to Davis Straits or the like where a fleet was lately wont to sail together. In old time, records tell us, it was the Biscayans who led in whaling, and later those hardy mariners of Dieppe, whose fleur-de-lis still marks the north even for the British compass card. By and by, as the whale became practically extinct in the North Sea, the center of the most difficult. and dangerous of maritime enterprises moved northward to Dundee,

As I write this, I learn that the Austrian Government has just carried off a picked squad of forty of our shipbuilding workmen with their necessary laborers, to the navy yard at Trieste to train their workmen there. Thus though for many reasons the Clyde is prevailing over the Tay, it is evidently not our workmen who are to blame. And here in fact is the old Viking life of shipbuilding and emigration, with both elements still in progress together.

and seems even now passing to Shetland and Lofoten, soon no doubt to disappear altogether. Little reflection is needed to see how hardy and enduring, how strenuous and observant, how cautious yet how bold, must be the type of mariner whom these voyages call for and train; and what is the point for our present purpose-how fitted is this type of mind and character, on its return with varying fortunes, yet on the whole with comparative wealth, to the ordinary community during every winter, and mixing with the townsfolk at leisure, and on terms of no common authority-to set its stamp upon the general outlook, if not even determine the mental atmosphere of the town. Here in fact are the conditions of nurture for what is perhaps the very strongest and most virile variety of the "canny Scot" which the business world has so often had good reason to mistake for the Scot in general, steady, vigilant, foreseeing, adventurous, decisive, he does not wait on fortune, but pursues her boldly, if need be even with his harpoon. Here then lies no small element in Scottish business enterprise and surely in that of New England also.

But our Dundee manufacturers, it will be said, are jute spinners and weavers, not whale fishers. True, but these jute weavers of to-day were linen weavers of old; and until steam displaced sail this district led in sailcloth weaving for the navy as well as the mercantile marine, and still makes the tentcloth for war. How this association of weaver and sailor is expressed not only in goods but in men, how these types in fact are akin in every sense, may be illustrated by the contemporary detail that one of our largest manufacturers of to-day, who still leads in sailcloth and tentcloth as well as in jute, has succeeded a father who was at the same time Gladstone's naval minister. This seems a mere accident when viewed from without, but is a normal instance of our social structure seen from within. So the added fact that the latest British naval magnate who retired with a peerage, said to be well earned as such things go, was again a Dundonian, may appear mere coincidence. Yet the least degree of local familiarity will be found to justify and strengthen the impression here suggested. This, briefly restated, is the interpretation of the essential qualities and defects of this particular city in terms not merely of its present predominant manufacture to which the usual type of social survey at its best refers us, but, below

*Thus our nearest territorial magnate owes his earldom and estate of "Camperdown," to the victory of his grandsire. Admiral Duncan, over the Dutch.