Metropolitan

“ Once already our city, to which have come the duties and responsibilities of metropolitan greatness before it was able to fairly measure its task, has felt the swell of its resistless flood. If it rise once more, no human power may avail to check it. ”

“ There is no charge laid to the door of one church for not having gone into the concerns of another: there is not the slightest appearance of any metropolitan relationship—the metropolitan centre was above in the glory, and all catholic claims rested there. ”

“ We exchanged cards, and finding that we were bound to the same place, to the intellectual centre of the metropolis, we decided to travel together. I say the centre of the metropolis because the metropolitan area is a thousand miles long and five hundred in width, and contains one fifth of the population of the planet. But even here, each house has about a rood of land, and fruits and vegetables are grown in great abundance; the whole area is more like a park than a city, so says my new friend. ”

“ Too often the American that himself makes his fortune, builds him a great metropolitan house, in the most metropolitan street of the most metropolitan town. Whereas a European of the same sort would thereupon migrate into the country. ”

“ It is thus used now for the capital of a country, which contains the various official buildings of the administrative departments, the Houses of Parliament, &c. In the case of London, the term “metropolitan” is sometimes applied to the whole area including the “City of London,” e.g. ”

“ This fact alone must attract to our metropolis the best of our population, the bone and sinew which have no longer any use for themselves where they have been expended in rearing colossal fortunes, and now demand a metropolitan repose. ”

“ But we must not therefore assume that the metropolitan populations consume the metropolitan matches. Taking the population at upward of two millions, and the inhabited houses at about three hundred thousand, let us endeavor to estimate the distribution of these little articles of domestic comfort. ”

“ Another matter that has engaged public attention is the apparent difference of opinion between the Metropolitan and the Metropolitan District Companies, as to the control of the Inner Circle. Nature has designed them to be one, and but for vested and promoters’ interests, they probably would have been one from the first. ”

“ Now metropolitan casts are composed chiefly of well known people. You have seen these people often, you know what they can do, you select them with an eye to round pegs and square holes, and you write to them or their representatives. ”

“ I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother-tongue. ”

“ She has clung to some of her small town customs longer than her neighbors, but of late she has attempted metropolitanism—they have builded two big new hotels in the place, and the radicals have dared to place a big building or two off Main street—quite a step in a town which has become famous as a one-street town. ”

“ The man who was the great brain in the brain-pan of Metropolis had ceased to press his fingers on the blue metal plate.
In ten hours he would let the machine brute roar anew. And in another ten hours, again. And always the same, and always the same, without ever loosening the ten-hour clamp.
Metropolis did not know what Sunday was. Metropolis knew neither high days nor holidays. Metropolis had the most saintly cathedral in the world, richly adorned with Gothic decoration. ”

“ The workman No. 11811, the man who lived in a prison-like house, under the underground railway of Metropolis, who knew no other way than that from the hole in which he slept to the machine and from the machine back to the hole—this man saw, for the first time in his life, the wonder of the world, which was Metropolis: the city, by night shining under millions and millions of lights. ”

“ It was a very pleasant moment in the growth of the metropolis which had become, in a quiet, provincial way, a town in the special sense in which that word connotes a group of people numerous enough to constitute a society, fond of the same pleasures, interested in local incidents and amusements, sufficiently intimate to have formed a code of social standards and manners. ”

“ The heart of the machine-city of Metropolis dwelt in a white, cathedral-like building. The heart of the machine-city of Metropolis was, until this day and this hour, guarded by one single man. The heart of the machine-city of Metropolis was a machine and a universe to itself. Above the deep mysteries of its delicate joints, like the sun's disc—like the halo of a divine being—stood the silver-spinning wheel, the spokes of which appeared in the whirl of revolution, as a single, gleaming, disc. ”

“ Metropolis, moreover, means a place where burn the beacon-lights of intelligence and culture; where the latest word 116 of science is spoken; where every day a superstition dies; where seekers after truth come nearest to their goal. A metropolis is the essence of our New Century civilization,—the creation of an irresistible modern impulse, an entity that challenges our admiration and inspires us with awe.
THE METROPOLIS OF THE MOORS
APPROACHING FEZ
But there is in this world a great city, the metropolis of a nation, which is not like the cities that we know. ”

“ And you, father, you press your fingers upon the little blue metal plate near your right hand, and your great glorious, dreadful city of Metropolis roars out, proclaiming that she is hungry for fresh human marrow and human brain and then the living food rolls on, like a stream, into the machine-rooms, which are like temples, and that, just used, is thrown up.... ”

“ That great City is, like some of the capitals of Europe, built on a broad river, with the mass of the metropolis on the one bank, but a wide-spreading suburb on the other. As the Trastevere is to Rome, as Southwark to London, so is earth to heaven, the bit of the city on the other side the bridge. ”

“ In a vast and flourishing metropolis the individual in liberty and security passes among the countless waves of this ocean of men.
A metropolis thus rising from its contracted infancy, extending in growth, and diversified by new classes of society, presented many novelties in its crowded scenes; mutable manners, humorous personages, all the affectations or the homeliness of its citizens. Many writers, among whom were some of admirable genius, devoted their pens to fugitive objects and evanescent scenes, sure of finding an immediate reception from the sympathy of their readers. ”

“ If then, there are twenty such avenues to the metropolis, it appears that the total of the regular ingress and egress will be 16,000 persons, of whom perhaps 8,000 walk, 2,000 arrive in public conveyances, and 6,000 ride on horseback, or in open or close carriages. Such a phenomenon is presented no-where else in the world; and it never can exist except in a city which unites the same combined features of population, wealth, commerce, and the varied employments which belong to our own vast metropolis. ”

“ Thus flippantly do some of the younger sons of men blaspheme this metropolis of the mid-West—a city the creation of which is, by many persons of discrimination, held to be the chief romance and abiding miracle of the nineteenth century. ”

“ It should be remembered that one great use of a metropolis, if not the greatest, is to test everything for the benefit of the whole of the rest of the country. The country may, according to circumstances, be more or less ready to avail itself of the benefit ”

“ This city is our metropolis, with which we are connected by small steamers crossing to and fro with the tide, and where all our shopping is done, our own ville being too thoroughly limited and roturier in taste to merit many of our shekels. ”

“ Only twelve miles from the metropolis, and in reality one of its many suburbs, it nestles among the hills, and looks off upon a broad expanse of field and meadow and forest, as though there were no such place as London in existence. ”

“ It is not these things, superadded characteristics, negligible details, which cause one to cry or to laugh—which mark the difference between town and town. It does not matter how one sees a town—but how one feels it, the soul, the meaning, the reason of it.
And one can feel New York as one can feel no other town—not even London. ”

“ It is the product of limited means of communication and constitutes a more or less self-sustaining economic unit. The city is a more highly specialized unit and, as a result, is a part of a wider interrelated area, while the metropolis tends to become a cosmopolitan unit based upon a relatively high degree of development of the means of communication. The differences between these three urban types is not only expressed in terms of number of inhabitants and area of occupation, but also in social organization and in attitudes. ”

“ So let no one imagine for this, the world's metropolis, a great over-crowded city different from Boston or New York,—a vast labyrinth of narrow and crooked streets, in which are evidences of bad conditions, the results of life in a dark age,—for nothing of the kind is true. In some portions, e. g. not far from Covent Garden Market, there are streets where very poor people reside, and are crowded, but not in very old and peculiar buildings. In no way are the conditions worse than in sections of New York and Boston. London is a very large and very fine city, modern in general appearance. ”

“ There are certain descriptions of people who, oddly enough, appear to appertain exclusively to the metropolis. You meet them, every day, in the streets of London, but no one ever encounters them elsewhere ”

“ The star-shaped contour of the modern great city, thrusting out arms along every available railway line, knotted arms of which every knot marks a station, testify sufficiently to the relief of pressure thus afforded. Great Towns before this century presented rounded contours and grew as a puff-ball swells; the modern Great City looks like something that has burst an intolerable envelope and splashed. ”

“ In some countries, the large cities absorb the wealth and fashion of the nation; they are the only fixed abodes of elegant and intelligent society, and the country is inhabited almost entirely by boorish peasantry. In England, on the contrary, the metropolis is a mere gathering-place, or general rendezvous, of the polite classes, where they devote a small portion of the year to a hurry of gayety and dissipation, and, having indulged this kind of carnival, return again to the apparently more congenial habits of rural life. ”

“ The houses in the other parts of the city are scattered, but without ever losing sight of the regularity of the original plan; and to a person who has been travelling much through the country, and marked the immense quantity of new manufactories, new canals, new railroads, new towns, and new cities, which are springing, as it were, from the earth in every part of it, the appearance of the metropolis rising gradually into life and splendour, is a spectacle of high historic interest. ”

“ There are a million of people in this single metropolis, each of whom would willingly stand on the pedestal which you occupy. Will they forgive you for thrusting them from their place, or not triumph if they see you totter? ”

“ Day, who gives us a very full and exhaustive account of all the social surroundings of the ‘Empire City,’ with its huge Babel-like hotels, its swarm of restaurants and eating-houses, necessary to a people who live out of their own homes, and its varied modes of locomotion, likens this huge hive to ‘a combination of London, Berlin, and Paris.’ The city is laid out in parallelograms, and the streets are numerically named. The practice—widely prevalent—of hanging out clothes to dry on the house-tops must be sadly detrimental to the appearance of respectable neighbourhoods. ”

“ The contrast between these pure white shafts, and the dark green of the sward and foliage, is both striking and beautiful, while, in the far distance, the gazer, turning from this scene of silence and death, lovely as it is, may behold the bright waters of the Bay or Sound, covered with the life and activity of the commerce of this great country, and the Metropolis itself lies almost at his feet. ”

“ The conception of a city held by the railway engineer is, we have already seen, not that of a city at all, but that of a town. And this limitation applies throughout the whole sphere of thought and action belonging to this phase of life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Believing that a Metropolis of Three and a Half Millions of people should be observed and described, if observed and described at all, in a large and comprehensive sense, in order that a thorough knowledge of it may be obtained by those who will do me the honor of turning the leaves of this book, I have not hesitated to take my readers into places which they might shrink from visiting alone, and which are rarely or ever seen by the stranger, in London. ”

“ Metropolis is a classic of science-fiction which created an impact on the literary world which reverberates to this day. Its dramatic presentation of the city-world of the next century stirred the minds of readers with an unforgettable vision of a metropolis grown to Gargantuan proportions, of humanity fighting to keep its soul against the monster world of machinery, robots, and complexity that had been spawned in our own century. The book inspired a movie which is possibly the best science-fiction film ever made. ”