Science and Citizenship 



ascent from geographical science to the loftiest 

 aspirations of social idealism. 



XV 



The geographer's vision of the city, as the 

 realisation of regional potency, is a faculty not 

 of the professed scientists only. It is possessed 

 also in varying degrees of fulness and clearness 

 by every wise and active citizen, or at least by 

 every citizen not altogether dehumanised by the 

 machinery of education and affairs, or as Mr. Wells 

 says, " birched into scholarship and sterility." It 

 was the geographer's vision that prompted the city 

 fathers of Glasgow to transform the shallow estuary 

 of the Clyde into one of the great highways of world 

 commerce. It was the absence of the geographer's 

 vision that prompted Philip II. of Spain to cut off 

 the national capital from access to the sea by 

 removing it to the arid central plateau. It has 

 been the geographer's vision which has inspired 

 so many German municipalities to purchase and 

 allocate to the common weal large tracts of 

 suburban territory. And wanting the geographer's 

 vision, our own municipalities have too often 

 allowed the immediate environs of our cities to 

 become the prey of the jerry builder and the land 

 speculator. These are obvious and conspicuous 

 examples. But the influence of geographical fore- 

 sight, or its absence, is to be traced into every 

 ramification of civic policy, into every department 

 of civic activity. To draw upon the resources of 



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