Localism

“ Now what are the practical consequences of this large and increasing non-local element in your old local government areas? First, there is this. The non-local people do not follow, have neither the time nor the freedom nor the stimulus of sufficient interests to follow local politics. They are a sort of Outlanders. Local politics remain therefore more and more in the hands of the dwindling section of people whose interests really are circumscribed by the locality. ”

“ Every town in every English colony is the fruit and outcome of that new individuality. Every new institution which new conditions of life call into being is a similar fruit and outcome—a fruit and outcome in which human nature has become, or has given signs or becoming, so moulded into fitness for the social state, that it will tolerate no interference save that interference which maintains the equal freedom of all. ”

“ A large proportion of our population to-day, a large and an increasing proportion, has no localised interests at all as an eighteenth-century person would have understood locality.
Take for example Guildford, or Folkestone, and you will find that possibly even more than half the wealth in the place is non-local wealth—wealth, that is, having no relation to the local production of wealth—and that a large majority of the more educated, intelligent and active inhabitants derive their income, spend their energies, and find their absorbing interests outside the locality. ”

“ The settlement has its critics and its devoted supporters; it is one of the voluntary experiments that shows the spirit of its promoters and that helps along social progress, and it must be estimated among the assets of a community. Here and there in the country among certain groups, as lumbermen, miners, or construction workers, or even in a settled town, many of the methods of the settlement are likely to find acceptance, and the settlement idea of neighborliness is fundamental to all happy and successful social life. ”

“ And no less clearly and decisively did he write of the value of local history: "There is no district, no town, no parish, whose history is not worth working out in detail, if only it be borne in mind that the local work is a contribution to a greater work." ”

“ In all societies, thanks to the improved means of communication and the activity of commerce, distant regions are brought nearer, their inhabitants mingle together, and tend to lose the feeling of a separate life and destiny. Everywhere we see a daily diminution of the differences between localities, persons, ideas, and interests. In fact everything which serves as framework or support to special or partial groups, intermediate between the State and the individual, has received a shock, and has been undermined or destroyed. ”

“ In a country with a great expanse of territory, with peoples of widely differing customs and ideas, local self government in local matters is essential to the peace and happiness of the people in the several communities as well as to the strength and unity of the country as a whole. ”

“ The settlement of townships and counties in our country by distinct bodies of foreigners is, therefore, a great evil; and a daily newspaper, with an Irish, German, or French prefix, or in a foreign language, is a perpetual breeder of national animosities, and an effectual bar to the Americanization of our foreign population. ”

“ A coalescence of the people into bodies politic in territorial areas now became complete.
The territorial series enters into the plan of government of modern civilized nations. Among ourselves, for example, we have the township, the county, the state, and the United States; the inhabitants of each of which are an organized body politic with powers of local self-government. Each organization is in full vitality and performs its functions within a definite sphere in which it is supreme. ”

“ But above all, there are innumerable small centres of population, of quiet and docile folk, hungering for the presence of intelligent and enterprising settlers who would look kindly upon them, who would foster their local life, increase the productivity of the neighbourhood, take part in their civic and economic advancement. ”

“ For if one buys one’s food, one’s clothes, one’s furniture at the same big, local store, and if one takes one’s literature from the same bookstall, one attains to a sort of nationality. But it is not the nationality of the village, where local effort can develop into art, because it develops slowly and creeps back upon itself. ”

“ Quite small towns in France and in western Europe generally, usually contain two or three residences of the local nobility which do something to redeem the place from utter provincialism. It is the absence of such buildings perhaps that gives even our large country towns the aspect of mere agricultural centres or overgrown villages. ”

“ What I merely wish to insist upon is that the older and recognised localities, which our fathers would naturally have visited a couple of decades or more ago in their search for old books, are not those which would, as a rule, afford much scope for enterprise now. We must go further afield, and not expect to find a mass of stalls huddled together in a single street, as though one locality had tapped and drained the life-blood of the rest. ”

“ But there were also, surrounding that inland sea, in such great numbers as to form the predominant type of society, a series of Cities, some of them commercial ports, most of them controlling a small area from which they drew their agricultural subsistence, but all of them remarkable for this, that their citizens drew their civic life from, felt patriotism for, were the soldiers of, and paid their taxes to, not a nation in our sense but a municipality. ”

“ Speaking of the quarrels of the fisher folk, you have experienced that which happens inevitably to a resident of Paris. The little disputes and the little interests of the provinces seem so petty and so pitiable, that one deplores the condition of people who live there. It is certain, however, that after a few months in the country one does as the natives do: one becomes interested in local affairs, and finally completely provincial. ”

“ Perhaps it is less attributable to any characteristic volatility in the character of the inhabitants of our metropolis, than to the singular variety and number of the beautiful localities which surround our city, and in emulous rivalry attract our attention, that this inconstancy of attachment to any one locality is more strikingly instanced among ourselves, than among the citizens of any other great town with which we are acquainted. ”

“ Municipal home rule, if it were permitted to cover all these things, would be another name for local chaos. The relations between a city and the surrounding country are so intimate, and each depends so much upon the other, that no rigid line of separation between local and general interests can be drawn. ”

“ By this cause, acting through ages, an aversion to the central authority, and a disposition to resist or thwart it, has been deeply impressed upon localities; and even in countries (as, for example, France) in which the ancient localities have been effaced, the feelings engendered by a bygone order of things still operate to no inconsiderable extent. Hence a barbarous tendency in the populations and governments of localities to sever their local interests from the interests of the general community. ”

“ Self-interest and a criminal avarice have fomented and kept alive the seeds of division between the inhabitants of the towns and those of the country, between the farmer, the mechanic, and the trader— the like has happened between adjoining towns and districts—an universal selfishness, in short, has prevailed. ”

“ Intimately bound up with the race are of course the folk-lore of a district, and what we are now pleased to call provincialisms, but which are more properly nationalisms, showing us the real texture of our language ”

“ It is the term applied to the region whose social conditions result from the application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming influences of free land. By this application, a new environment is suddenly entered, freedom of opportunity is opened, the cake of custom is broken, and new activities, new lines of growth, new institutions and new ideals, are brought into existence. ”

“ The communities of those days were cities, the communities of our days are nations; but cities and nations alike share in a common political life in which many of the ages that went between their days and ours had no share. ”

“ Intellectual effects of locality: the geographical position made them mountaineers and mariners; variety of experience; each petty community possessed an individual life, yet sympathized with the remainder; commerce with a great diversity of half-country-men ”

“ In common with them there has been a gradual growth from those fragmentary germs of civic life out of which civil government grows, which fragmentary forms begin to operate as soon as individuals come together in social relation, often long before localities are entitled to take their places as parts of a nation. ”

“ Now, if that man had enjoyed a school excursion to the town when a boy, he would have deprived me of a good story. A glimpse of the town in youth might also do good in checking the perpetual urban immigration, which, alas! removes so many of the rustic population from the soil, and places them under it. ”

“ The differences of manner, bearing, speech, between the gentry and the common people, are still accepted and valued as genuine contributions to the varied interests of national life. These differences have declined in intensity of feeling from eighteenth-century ruralism to modern urbanity, but they remain strongly marked even in the blending of large city life. ”

“ Now and in the future there is need that local patriotism, pride in the local community, and willingness to serve it, whether it be village or city, should be kindled again to its old vigour.xiii With the revival of the spirit will come a revival of some of the old forms of village common life, and a creation of new forms in place of those which will remain among the forgotten facts of the past. ”

“ The good effects of frontier life are there, genuine democracy, neighborhood feeling, hospitality, courage, and honesty; but along with them are seen the drawbacks of the frontier: ignorance, uncouthness, boisterousness, lawlessness, a lack of enterprise, and contempt for the experience of older communities. ”

“ We have seen that in localities differing so widely as do mountain-regions, marshes or mud-islands, and jungles, men of different races have developed political heads of this compound kind. And, on observing that the localities, otherwise so unlike, are alike as being severally made up of parts difficult of access, we can not question that to this is mainly due the governmental form under which their inhabitants unite. ”

“ A city stronghold established a centre of state life and government, and villages exchanged the privileges and perils of isolation for the position of local hamlets attached to the common centre of the state, and in this new connexion developing what we may fairly call political consciousness. ”

“ That which had been one widely scattered and loosely connected people had become divided into many distinct communities, each with its own government, its separate historical traditions, its local prides and local antagonisms, its more or less definite and sharp-cut national consciousness. ”

“ With respect to the latter, history will show us the village growing into the city, and neighbouring cities associating, and growing, in one way or another, into unions of cities, nations, and empires; but the necessity for, and the object of association will remain the same; for persons and property will always need protection; collectively, against aggressions from without, and, in the case of the individual, against aggressions from within. ”

“ The existence of a common in association with a town or village or group of villages is not a self-evident proposition, to be taken for granted. It is clearly part of a system which it now becomes our business to investigate. ”

“ Inside the modern city, in spite of its nominal political unity, there are probably more communities, more differing customs, traditions, aspirations, and forms of government or control, than existed in an entire continent at an earlier epoch. ”

“ In proof of this great and striking truth, no other argument requires to be offered, than an immediate reference to the experience of all ages and places: the various nations of the earth, the provinces of each nation, the towns, and even the villages of the same province, differ from each other in their accommodations; and are in every respect more flourishing, the greater their activity in establishing new channels of useful employ, calculated to procure the necessaries and comforts of life. ”

“ It is, perhaps, less essential to insist on them here, because, whereas totemic society is a thing which we civilized folk have the very greatest difficulty in understanding, we all have direct insight into the meaning of a territorial arrangement; since, from the village community up to the modern state, the same fundamental type of social structure obtains throughout. ”