Chapter XV 



THE INFLUENCE OF URBAN AND RURAL 

 ENVIRONMENT 



Haven Emerson and Earle B. Phelps 



IS the city or the country proving the better place for 

 man to live in? Are there advantages in the urbs, a 

 place of strength with walls, beyond those of the rus, a 

 region of broad lands? Has human adjustment to the 

 congregate existence, implying compromise and sacrifice, 

 resulted also in biological adaptation, or success in a new 

 relationship between the individual and his material and 

 social environment? 



life in cities 



Cities are an experiment for man. He blundered and 

 wasted, lost and suffered in them for centuries before 

 sanitation made cities safe for hving, as they had long before 

 become relatively safer than the country for material 

 possessions. 



Only within the last hundred years have the changes come 

 which made the city dominate national and even continental 

 populations, at least in the number of inhabitants. 



The London of the Saxons held hardly 20,000 people. 

 From the time of Richard i to that of Henry vii, about 

 three hundred and eleven years, the population fluctuated 

 between 40,000 and 50,000. Between 1700 and 1800 there 

 was a growth of 6§ per cent and in the next hundred years 

 an increase of over 600 per cent. The extraordinary growth 

 of London did not begin until after 1850. Similarly New 

 York with under 80,000 in 1800 and about 600,000 in 1850, 

 has increased tenfold in the past seventy-eight years. 



And this is not exceptional either in the national or 

 continental sense, for the same influences and resource, 

 economic, social and scientific have prevailed widely, at 

 least in Europe and the Americas. 



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