Townspeople

“ People tell me that the countryside must always be stupid and backward, and I get angry, as if it were said that only townspeople had immortal souls, and it was only in the city that the flame of divinity breathed into the first men had any unobscured glow. ”

“ The town--a town of brick and tin--stands at the apparent edge of a vast plain of withered grass, from whose inhospitable aspect it turns and nestles, as if for protection, round the scrub-covered hills to northward. From among the crowd of one-storied dwelling-houses, more imposing structures, the seats of Government and commerce, rise prominently to catch the eye and impress the mind with the pleasing prospect of wealthier civilisation. ”

“ The whole population of the town is there: workers, soldiers, tradespeople, priests, officials, fishermen; all are intoxicated with the spirit of spring-time, talking, laughing, singing in joyous confusion, as if they were a single body overflowing with the zest of life. ”

“ The civic consciousness, sunning itself thus on the city's rim and glancing at the little swarming towered and gabled town within, and then at the blue undulations of the near Welsh border, may easily deepen to delicious complacency. ”

“ But neither the Town magnet nor the Country magnet represents the full plan and purpose of nature. Human society and the beauty of nature are meant to be enjoyed together. The two magnets must be made one. As man and woman by their varied gifts and faculties supplement each other, so should town and country. The town is the symbol of society—of mutual help and friendly co-operation, of fatherhood, motherhood, brotherhood, sisterhood, of wide relations between man and man—of broad, expanding sympathies—of science, art, culture, religion. ”

“ That the city's claim will come, bid me back into my place.
How can I go forth again to the hot and restless town,
Where the stranger people pass ever careless up and down,
Where convention chills each hand from a kind and friendly hold? ”

“ Take a town for all in all, in its sadness and pleasure, the shows that pass through it, the proclamations of kings, the tolling of the great bell, marshallings of men-at-arms and sermons of clerks; whatever it be distracts or engages it, I say you will find, take all in all, full the ten twelfths of a town's business to lie in the mere getting of wealth. ”

“ The motive, conscious or unconsious, of the writers and of the press in all this is to reproduce, as far as possible, in the city the conditions of life in the village. In the village everyone knew everyone else. Everyone called everyone by his first name. The village was democratic. We are a nation of villagers. Our institutions are fundamentally village institutions. In the village, gossip and public opinion were the main sources of social control. ”

“ The traveller who has asked at the bookshop of a provincial town for a local history or even for a local guide is as well able to realize the distance which parts us from France, Italy, or Germany, as is the student who inquires for a detailed account of how civic life or any one of its characteristic institutions grew up among us. A certain number of town histories do indeed exist, but they by no means always deal necessarily or even mainly with the life of the borough itself. ”

“ Each town was really a self-sufficing entity, both materially and intellectually. The modern idea of a town is that of a mere local aggregate of individuals, each pursuing a trade or calling with a view to the world-market at large. ”

“ Here is a town of twelve or thirteen thousand population, with electric lighted streets, and with blocks of buildings which are stately enough, and also architecturally fine enough, to command respect in any city. ”

“ The preparatory [x] work which the foreign student finds already finished and organized for his use, the English worker has in almost every case to do for himself. Even the briefest sketch of a town history too often implies the long labour of seeking out a mass of scattered and isolated details, which must first be drawn together into some connected sequence before it is possible to study the general bearing and significance of the story in relation to the growth of neighbouring boroughs. ”

“ HEREFORD town is one of those slumbrous cities, guiltless of any bait with which to lure the sight-seer, but possessing both a cathedral and an individuality of its own. It is a town which seems to have acquired no suburbs, to have grown up in its proper area out of the flat fields which lie around. But on the night of which I am speaking an unwonted stir was going on, a rumbling of vehicles through streets usually silent, and a great noise of voices and hoofs in the different inn yards. ”

“ The town is, certainly, the most moral of towns. You pass, from the railroad station, through a long, lonely suburb, with dusty rows of stunted trees on either side, and some few miserable beggars, idle boys, and ragged old women, under them. ”

“ No one ever saw one better situated; for the town was provided with forests and meadow-land, with vineyards and farms, with streams and orchards, with ladies and knights, and fine, lively youths, and polite, well-mannered clerks who spent their incomes freely, with fair and charming maidens, and with prosperous burghers. ”

“ Here and there, in those sluggish times, a town grew a little larger than its neighbours, as a port or as a centre of government; but all the towns in the world with more than a hundred [199] thousand inhabitants could be counted on a man's fingers. ”

“ Those writers who have imagined a reign of peace and happiness on earth, have generally described a rural country, where each small township was directed by the elders and wise men. This was the key of my design. Each village, however small, usually contains a leader, one among themselves whom they venerate, whose advice they seek in difficulty, and whose good opinion they chiefly value. ”

“ The town-crier is a venerable, white-bearded [222] individual whose family have held the post for many generations. It is his duty to announce any new regulations in the town, and to summon the populace to meetings or to work. ”

“ From contemplating most of the small towns with which I have come in contact and the little streets of the cities as contrasted with the great, I have come to dread the conventional point of view. The small mind of the townsmen is antipolar to that of the larger, more sophisticated wisdom of the city. ”

“ That towns, and even great towns, abode by the traditions of country life, is now abundantly manifest, but the indications above given shed only partial light on rural conditions in their earliest and fullest form. ”

“ But the beauty of this town consists in the number of gentry who dwell in and near it, the polite conversation among them, the affluence and plenty they live in, the sweet air they breathe in, and the pleasant country they have to go abroad in. ”

“ It is wonderful how the people of the town, who have every possible facility to leave the city, cling to it, and how, indeed, there are hundreds who flock in, though it is an open secret we have [4] neither money nor food. ”

“ In the paper read on Monday at a meeting of the Sociological Society by Professor GEDDES—an abstract of which we print—are contained ideas of practical value to be recommended to the study of ambitious municipalities. This is the age of cities, and all the world is city-building. Almost everywhere is a flow from the country town-ward. ”

“ Great population as constituting importance [136] in a city is comparatively a modern notion. In other ages towns became famous on account of their superior civic organization, their more advantageous situation, or the greater activity, intellectual, political, or commercial, of their citizens. ”

“ I had no doubt that I was in the neighborhood of some town, but of its name, and the part of the country in which it was located, I was ignorant. I at length found that I was receding from the woods altogether, and entering a champaign country, in the midst of which I now perceived a town of considerable magnitude, the inhabitants of which were entirely silent, and the town itself presented the appearance of total solitude. ”

“ They should be taught to see in the town common or village green a survival of that primitive institution of land-community upon which town and state are based. They should be taught the meaning of town and family names; how the word 'town' means, primarily, a place hedged in for the purposes of defence; how the picket-fences around home and house-lot are but a survival of the primitive town idea; how home, hamlet, and town live on together in a name like Hampton, or Home-town. They should investigate the most ordinary thing for these are often the most archaic. ”

“ That town, whose character is one of benevolence and good-will towards the unhappy, enjoys, in the opinion of all the wise and good, a reputation more exalted, more valuable, more noble, than it can possibly gain by the most extensive pursuits of commerce and the arts ”

“ Only for a moment, though; for when we drop our eyes to the street below us, those are our own townsfolk, well-remembered faces, that throng every doorstep and fill the overflowing pavements and swarming roadway. Yes, they are our own townsfolk, and they are taking care to let us know it—such a welcome they have made ready for us. ”

“ The elders of the town, or village, seated at the gate, or beneath the grateful shade of stately trees, and presided over by an English gentleman conversant with their habits and language, and possessed of tact, patience, and good sense, would probably dispense more evenhanded justice than is obtained by all the costly paraphernalia of courts of law founded on a totally different phase of civilization. ”

“ It must, however, be kept clearly in view that the city of each day and generation subsides or decays more or less completely into the mere town anew, as the cloister into the schools. The towns and cities of the world are thus classifiable in terms of their past development and present condition. ”

“ First, it is too large for the populousness of the city, which contains about 500 buildings. In so small a town, it must generally be empty, and consequently givs the town an appearance of solitude or dullness. ”

“ This is an urban age. The men of the villages, alas, are leaving behind them the green fields and purple moors of their childhood, are foolishly crowding into the narrow lanes and purlieus of the great cities. ”

“ "A town that boasts inhabitants like me
Can have no lack of good society!" ”

“ While the town was canvassed for workers and for pecuniary supporters of relief measures, and while the time of all actively engaged was consumed by their attention to this fragment of the city's needs, new demonstration was met at every turn that a single municipal condition cannot be treated apart from the total associated life of the city. ”

“ No better example could be found than this old town with its families who had come from well-to-do circumstances, not, as was the case with so many settlers of the new country, in order to escape trouble. ”

“ So the result would be that the newcomers would continue to go to the ten per-cent town from the seven-per-cent town and other places, till the one becomes a large and prosperous city, and the other a dilapidated, languishing town. ”

“ Then there are the peasants and wood-cutters, who come in from the hill-country to market, and who are suspicious of the plain-men and yet proud to depend upon a real town with a bishop and paved streets. ”

“ Small local jealousies between one village or town and a neighbouring one are often responsible for this sort of thing, the provincial mind loving to score over the people in the next parish or the next county. ”

“ For those who had dragged chains and hewed wood and drawn water in the town’s first days seemed by some specific gravity of the social system to be holding their places at those lower levels–always reaching vainly and eagerly, but always reaching a little higher and a little further from them for that equality of opportunity which seemed to lie about them that first day when the town was born. ”

“ A village of three or four hundred souls, for example, may accidentally have a greater claim on us, than a city of many thousands, if it be inhabited by those whose labour we daily employ, who minister to our wealth and comforts, and who naturally look to us for help. ”

“ It is evident, indeed, from the nature of the subject, that any writer who desires to give a survey of provincial town life as we can now picture it—from printed materials scattered in county histories, archæological journals, reports of commissions, imperfect abstracts of town documents, parliamentary records, charters, and stray pamphlets—must inevitably remain exposed to much correction in matters of detail from experts with local knowledge. ”

“ As the population increased in the town, streets of houses sprang up, some large, some small, built in rows and crescents and terraces, in which all the houses were alike; and very dull and drab and mean-looking many of them have become. ”

“ As you grew older, and learned to call more boys and girls in the school by name, and more of the clerks in the shops, you discovered new people in the town where you thought you knew everybody, and it made the town infinitely large. ”

“ In the midst of this busy life—a life where the citizens themselves watched over their boundaries, defended their territory, kept peace in their borders, took charge of the common property, governed the spending of the town treasure, laboured with their own hands at all public works, ordered their own amusements, the mediæval burgher had his training. ”

“ The inhabitants of a particular town are much better acquainted with its wants and interests than with those of other places; and are better judges of the capacity of their neighbors than of that of the rest of their countrymen. ”