this, in terms of the long character-forming age of whale fishing, and thus in fact of the dominant Viking stock.3

To this in fact we owe not only our major industries directly, as of shipbuilding and sailcloth, and thence to finer linens, to jute sacking and carpets, but also our minor ones. This jute itself till lately came in great four-masters by a six-months' voyage from India. The same Viking enterprise brings us the Hesperidian fruit we transform into the orange marmalade which is our city's fame, so that you not only find it on every British breakfast table, but even as "Dondée" on the dessert list of your Paris restaurant. Most curious of our local industries under this gray sky, but in some measure also of kindred development, is photography. For here has been, for a generation at least, one of the largest and certainly also one of the best centers of landscape photography, sending out its experts throughout the world, printing their negatives in a huge factory here, and exporting the product back to the place of its origin. Is not even this the Viking lookout in a new and cultured form? The corresponding interest exists in landscape painting, but not in architecture nor sculpture, arts as yet unknown to Viking peoples. The city, save for the massive fourteenth century church tower of which Emerson speaks in his "English Traits," has few architectural attractions. The beauties of the great Hanseatic cities have inland origins; and such picturesqueness as Norse or Scottish maritime towns and cities may and do sometimes possess is more due to accident, age and irregularity of grouping than to design. Hence, though our modern Vikings, the manufacturers, have endowed and established a university college during the past quarter century, and this in some respects not ungenerously, the heterogeneous buildings dotted over our spacious campus are the jetsam of six or seven separate architects, good, bad and indifferent; while under this Viking régime, the writer, as botanist and college gardener, as would-be city improver also, is naturally afforded the most ample leisure to be found in the professorial world to console himself for the small result of his rustic preachings, his floral ministrations, by thus working out the sociological explanation of it. On the other hand, that the Antarctic exploration movement of the past

For a very forcible statement of the qualities and achievements of this North Sea fisher type, see De Tourville's Growth of European Nations, translated by M. Loch. Sonnenschein, 1909. Also "La Science Sociale" (passim) and the various works of M. Edmund Demolins.

decade should have been initiated from here half a generation ago,* that our zoological museum should be of the best, or that the American-Canadian seal arbitrations of past years or International North Sea Fisheries Commission of the present should here find the working expert-all these are natural and intelligible, rational because regional.

That such a study of the evolution of local qualities is the needful preliminary to the corresponding interpretation of social defects has now to be more fully shown. That misery of labor, and particularly of woman, which makes Dundee the very hades of the industrial world, and of which the consequences and aggravations, in bad housing, in disease and mortality bills both of adults and of infants, and in those terrible returns of insanity, vice and crime which are the disgrace of Scotland among the sister kingdoms and in the civilized world, are all here met with a degree of apathy of the prosperous and directing classes and of the working people alike which is so much marked beyond other towns known to me either at present or from history, as to demand an explanation and invite a corresponding special inquiry. The explanation has no doubt several factors. Thus the utilitarian philosophy, the so-called orthodox political economy, is very largely a regional product, for the essential thought of Adam Smith, of the two Mills and of Bain is as typical an expression of this East Coast as are Scott's romances of the Border. Such philosophy of life is only consciously taught from above after it has arisen in and from the general life below, and so is most dominant in those minds and lives which have never consciously given it a thought, much less read a word of it. Behind this, too, is the old callousness of the conquering Viking to the condition of the defeated and uprooted Celt; again of course not at all conscious, but all the more terrible, since for ages practically an instinct of each new governing class in its turn. But the people, the women workers, here so often barefoot and disheveled, stunted and starveling, beyond those of other manufacturing cities, have they lost all spirit and hope? There are moments at which it might seem not so, but active energies too readily pass off, sometimes to explode in Mænadic scenes on Saturday night, at New Year, or between times also; thus in the main the spirit of our city sits impassive, a saddened and silent crone, in sullen acceptance of what seem

'Cf. W. S. Bruce, Oceanographical Laboratory, Edinburgh, and W. G. Burn Murdoch's, From Edinburgh to the Antarctic, 1895.

falling fortunes. Whence then this mood of passive fatalism, so strange a contrast to the confident utilitarianism so normal to Viking enterprise? Is this not first the development throughout the years, and then the persistence through life, of the stoic endurance necessary to all fisher-folk, but above all to the women of a whalefishing community who for generations have had to learn the hard lesson of starving along as patiently as they could, and to teach this to their children? At the return of the whale fishers of old, as with busy times to-day, an improvident revel is thus natural enough -but so is its nemesis in turn; and thus at length we reach the explanation of that condition of Dundee which is detailed in the recent and easily accessible report of the Dundee Social Union, which takes its place along with the better known volumes of Charles Booth for London, of Sherwell for Edinburgh, Rowntree for York, and Marr for Manchester, but which is, alas, the most tragic and least hopeful of them all. Hence its copious and forcible reviewing in the London and English press, and with such vigor as for a brief season to stir the local apathy, though this soon resumed the even tenor of its downward way.

Yet even with this outline analysis of past and present such a contrast as that of Dundee with Aberdeen is not exhausted. For here are two neighboring cities of similar population and racial contrast and admixture, and in comparative neighborhood upon the North Sea; yet the latter, though not without its drawbacks, is probably upon the whole the most advanced of the regional capitals of Great Britain, just as the former is in too many ways one of the backward and depressed. One great historic contrast is prominent ; Aberdeen has had comparative peace throughout its existence; it remembers only one great battle, with the Highlanders at "the red Harlaw" in the fifteenth century, and that victorious. Whereas Dundee has known defeat and sack, massacre and destruction, and not once only, but again and again, from the Edwardian wars at the close of the thirteenth century, elsewhere the golden age of citizenship, and thence on to the frightful bombardment and sack which marked the Cromwellian conquest under General Monk, and with minor losses thereafter also. The silent misery of Dundee, and doubtless the squalor of old Edinburgh also, has thus been derived

Report on Housing and Industrial Conditions in Dundee, and Medical Inspection of School Children. By Miss M. A. Walker and Miss Mona Wilson. Dundee : Leng & Co., 1905.

in part from their exposure to some of those ruthless waves of conquest which have gone so long and so thoroughly over Ireland, and of which the resultant passive mood has as plainly passed below memory into dulled instinct and habit, as does the active mood, still recurrent in the Irishman, into protest or policy. Where the local patriciate has been exterminated once and again, the heads and flower of families slain, the women in every sense ruined, that community, that city, as history shows, may too often need centuries to recover. That such cities do recover, contemporary Germany bears witness; but her cities still speak of themselves as only recovering in this generation of ours from the Thirty Years' War nine generations ago.

Viking conditions produce but small literary output; and as for the poor Celt, he reads his newspaper, but no longer sings; he has been through the board-schools of memory, so no longer remembers nor thinks. Dundee, with a population five or six times greater than that of Perth, has fewer booksellers, and these with smaller aggregate business; but an abundant and well-diffused weekly press, not only innocuous as such literature goes, but fairly strong in a vein of local color, rustic rather than urban, and of domestic sentiment, of which J. M. Barrie's pleasing writings may be taken as the characteristic blossom. The real expression of Dundee in literature, that of its essential tragedy, of the industrial and even earlier depression of woman, I take to be the "Song of the Shirt," and this not only as symbol, but in fact. For here Tom Hood, whose name and kindred are still with us, and whose first writings appeared in our local press, spent two or three unhappy formative years of adolescence, and thus must have first laid in those impressions of the misery of the woman worker, which he had of course opportunity of elaborating in his maturer life in London. Our few figure painters, too, have in the main the kindred tragic note, which indeed seems inevitable in our day along with observing and interpreting powers in any form.

III.

Our survey is still far from ended; and, as becomes the theme. set me, its darker side has been the more prominent, so that some of the specific conditions both past and present which have made for deterioration in this particular example of town life should be made plain.

I am well aware that these historic examples from Scotland do not fit to any American city, though it has always seemed to me there is plenty of work for the historical observer and interpreter in America too. My whole point has been to insist upon the necessity of a local and Regional Survey of geographic and historic conditions, and of the resultant social qualities and defects together, as complemental, as interchangeable so far also. I plead that sociologists must labor like geological and ecological surveyors, and this over the length and breadth of their lands, and of the world, and must thence educe conclusions which may be the start point for fresh comparisons. In this task it is better to begin with the smaller and simpler cities, not the greater and complexer; hence I have chosen Perth and Dundee rather than Edinburgh and Glasgow, Paris and London; and I see I might have made my points clearer had I chosen simpler and smaller cities, younger ones also.

In adopting this treatment I am not denying the possibility of a more general and more comprehensive grasp of city problems; but I do strongly plead that this should follow, not precede, a survey, an intimate personal knowledge of many cities. As an indication of this more general method of treatment, I may be permitted to refer to my various papers on Civics in the three volumes of "Sociological Papers," the recent organ of the Sociological Society of London, as also to one or two briefer notes in its present "Sociological Review." As an example of complemental practical endeavor my City Development (Outlook Tower, Edinburgh, 1904) may be indicated. As convener of the "Cities Committee" of the Sociological Society, I shall be glad to hear from any who may be interested in that necessary, and I doubt not approaching, Survey of Cities in which it is our ambition to take an active part.