The Free City; A Book of Neighborhood (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III CITY-WORSHIP LAYS HER BASIS DEEP THE city state snuggles into the landscape. It belongs to natural history. This fact is primary, quintessential; the rudiment from which all of the other facts take their form and texture. Of all the peoples that developed municipality as their mode of the social union, the Greeks were the chiefest. In their literature and art they painted a picture to point the truth I am here proclaiming. It was the story of Giant Antaeus, son of Mother Earth. Mightiest of the mighty was he, so long as his feet were touching the ground; in mystic fashion the strength of the soil seeped up into his members like sap into a rooted oak. He had an enemy. In every encounter between the two, Antaeus was the victor; the energies welling up into him from rock and turf and loam, put power into his ankle bones. One luckless day, however, that enemy learned the secret. Thereupon, in a wrestle, he manoeuvered so as to lift Antaeus from the ground; and then easily conquered him. That parable enshrines the philosophy of city republics; the cause of their security and the secret of their overthrow. Under barbarism, the city is sacrificed to the country. Under nationalism, the country is sacrificed to the city. Under municipalism, the two advance hand in hand. Orchard city, is a fit name for the citizencommonwealth in its perfection; rural metropolis: a municipality of milk and honey. In this natural form of state, the farm articulates with the marketplace; so that countryman and townsman are not two separate classes, but the same man is both. A municipal fabric of state puts a world capital in the midst of every farming district. That metropolis is reachable by the husbandmen from the fields round about; like Cincinnatus, leaving his plow and giving himse...