needs: first, the enforcement of the law; second, the need of removing special and artificial privileges. As The Outlook pointed out, while the bill was before the legislature,

it has been charged with undertaking through this Bill to extend the practice of selling liquor on Sunday. It does nothing of the kind, however. The practice of selling liquor is already established according to law in New York. What the Committee has undertaken to do is to see that a specially vicious kind of resort shall not have the special privilege of this practice. In other words, so far as Sunday sale is concerned, the Bill does not extend Sunday selling but limits it.

THE DEFINITION OF THE CITY1

RENÉ MAUNIER 2
Paris

The study of cities is not of interest to the statistician alone. The phenomena of the city, because of the various social consequences flowing from them, are of primary importance to the sociologist. It is astonishing then that a scientific definition of it has scarcely been attempted as yet.

Such is the purpose of the present study. But first we must undertake a critical examination of the current definitions. These fall into two groups.

I. Most of them are based upon some special characteristic. They term every social establishments presenting a certain definite quality a city. But they differ as to the nature of the characteristic.4

Some authors employ morphological characteristics. Cities have commonly been defined as aggregations having a certain population, i. e., the city group is characterized by its size or by its extent, by the number of its human elements in connection

5

This study is an extract from a forthcoming book, L'origine et la fonction économique des villes, étude de morphologie sociale ("Bibliothèque sociologique internationale"), Paris, Giard et Brière, 1910.

2 Translated by L. L. Bernard, The University of Chicago.

The word in the original is établissement. Perhaps the English word community would have been a better equivalent, though somewhat narrower in sense. It seemed necessary however to use this word to translate société. As a consequence the literal, if somewhat awkward and vague, equivalent establishment was decided upon.-Tr.

We mention as examples the biological definitions, based upon organic comparisons. Thus Dr. Bordier (La vie des societés, 1887, p. 111) calls cities "the points of ossification of the social organism." See a criticism of this definition by Worms, Organisme et société, 1896, p. 163.

It is notably the point of view of Meuriot, Des agglomérations urbaines dans l'Europe contemporaine, 1898, and of Weber, The Growth of Cities, New York, 1899. Mr. Weber defines cities as aggregations having more than 10,000 inhabitants (op. cit., p. 16).

with the amount of its territorial element. Thus administrative statistics are most frequently based upon this assumption. The French censuses since 1846 and L'institut international de statistique since 1887, have applied the term city to every aggregation of more than 2,000 inhabitants. Such a definition cannot serve as the basis of a scientific study, and it has long been denounced as arbitrary. The space occupied by the establishment is too external a characteristic and varies too much according to the circumstances. Several historians have defined the city of the Middle Ages by another morphological characteristic, the presence of a fortification. But apart from the fact that this characteristic, which does not obtain in the case of modern cities, lacks universality, it still could not be used to define and to specify the mediaeval city, for many villages and even farms were also fortified."

The German writers of the eleventh century distinguished two kinds of places unfortified places (villages) and fortified places (cities). Thus they contrast the urbs, castellum or civitas with the villa or the vicus. See Keutgen, Untersuchungen über deutschen Stadtverfassung, p. 46. Mauer (Geschichte der Städteverfassung, I, 31 ff.) says the same: "Cities are villages surrounded by walls." See also Babeau, La ville sous l'ancien régime, p. 239, who detects in the rampart the essential quality of the city.

In all primitive societies villages are fortified. Africa: Masqueray, Formation des cités chez les populations sédentaires de l'Algérie, p. 86; Cyr. van Overberg, Les Mayombe, p. 160 (Belgian Congo); Asia: Cabaton, Les peuplades demicivilisées de l'Indochine (Conférences école coloniale, 1907–1908, p. 94); The Book of Ser Marco Polo, ed. Yule, II, 131 (China); Hunter, Imperial Gazetteer of India, I, 458; XIII, 88 ff.; Codrington, The Melanesians, p. 302 (the special necessity for protection against the head-hunters); America: Tylor, Primitive Culture [French translation, I, 54] (Sioux, Iroquois); Dorsey, Omaha Sociology, Third Rept. Bur. Amer. Ethn., pp. 313, 314 (description and plan of Fort Ponka); Diehl, L'Afrique byzantine, pp. 224, 292; Jullian, Histoire de la Gaule, II, 214, 215 (existence of open and fortified villages for refuge in war time); Flach, Origine historique de l'habitation, pp. 45 ff., and Origines de l'ancienne France, II, 301 ff.; Thierry, Monuments pour servir à l'histoire du Tiers-Etat, IV, 785 (the villages of Ponthieu were almost all fortified); Stouff, "La description de plusieurs fortresses et seigneuries de Charles le Téméraire," Revue bourg. Ens. Sup., XII, 14 (a village still fortified in 1473). Here is apparent a further reason why aggregations of 22 households, of 50 households, etc., are designated in the texts by the title castrum (Molinier, "La senechaussée de Rouergue," Bib. Ecole Chartes, 1883, pp. 468, 470 ff., numerous examples). See also K. Hegel, Entstehung des

Other writers, among them Rümelin, have made use of demographical characteristics and have defined the city for example by the lowness of its birth-rate or by its high marriage-rate. But he himself recognizes that these characteristics are by no means exclusive. The demography of the great city resembles that of the farm; that of the small city resembles that of the village. Moreover the demographical qualities of the city are not sufficiently stable to characterize it. They vary with changes in the size of the city, as well as according to the period and the community. Thus in the Middle Ages the city death-rate was lower than that of the country. At the time of Graunt the reverse was true. At the present time there is again a tendency, due to other causes, toward an urban death-rate lower than that of the country. On the other hand, the birth-rate of the city, which is ordinarily lower than the rural birth-rate, sometimes tends to surpass the latter.9

The juridical definitions1o are subject to the same defect that certain morphological definitions have. They are valid for certain types of cities only. Furthermore the juridical characteristics of the city are not universal even in a given social situation. The right of municipality (droit municipal) or the right of trade deutschen Stadtwesens, pp. 30, 33. That most of the ancient German villages were fortified has already been remarked by Roscher (Economie politique rurale [Nationalökonomik des Ackerbaues und der verwandten Urproduktionen], pp. 299, 300), who with Justi considers the village "a product of the age of the right of the strongest;" Gomme, The Village Community, pp. 122, 123; Stubbs (Constitutional History of England, I, chap. v [French translation, I, 101, note 5, and 114]), even claims that the term township which applies to the village as to the city, comes from the woven hedge or tun which surrounded all the villages that did not possess a wall proper. See, on the matter of fortified villages of the neolithic age, J. de Morgan, Les premières civilisations, étude sur la préhistoire et l'histoire, 1909, p. 152.

Rümelin, "Ville et campagne," in Problèmes d'économie politique et de statistique, pp. 210-12.

Thus in Massachusetts and in Sweden. See, Henderson, "Are Modern Industry and City Life Unfavorable to the Family?" American Journal of Sociology, XIV, 671.

10

Justi has defined the city by the existence of a council (Stadtrat). But many villages of the Middle Ages had an organ of that sort, as the panchayât of the Hindu village of the present. The city has also been defined by the specialness of its law, by the ensemble of its privileges (see, Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 173), what the Germans have called its "Privilegierung."

(droit du marché), which have frequently served as criteria for historians, were even in the Middle Ages lacking to many aggregations termed "cities" in the texts," and which were sufficiently important to be classed as such.

The most serious of the unilateral definitions are those based upon some functional characteristic. Every aggregation which is the seat of special activities, regardless of what those activities might be, has sometimes been called a city.12 The abstract specialness of the activity is taken into consideration independently of its concrete content. Still other and more careful writers. have demanded the presence of definite determined and concrete activities, and notably of certain industrial activities.13 In an offhand way the historians of the present define the mediaeval city by the existence of a market. But the history of the localization of industries proves satisfactorily that no industrial activity is a universal and exclusive characteristic of the city. The ancient cities, as Sombart, following Bücher,14 points out, were generally consumption cities, even the greatest of them. And in modern

"See, for example, Planiol, "Les villes de Bretagne au XVIIIe siècle," Nouv. rev. historique de droit, 1894, p. 134.

12

Müller-Lyer, Phasen der Kultur und Richtungslinien des Fortschritts, 1908, p. 133.

13 Adam Smith said (Wealth of Nations, Book III, chap. iii [French transl., pp. 475, 485]): "Cities are inhabited chiefly by artisans and tradespeople." A large portion of this article will go to prove the falsity of this statement, so far as it concerns the Middle Ages. See, especially Sombart, "Der Begriff der Stadt und das Wesen der Städtebildung," Braun's Archiv, 1907, XXV, 2: Cities are "aggregations of men dependent upon the products of outside agricultural labor for their subsistence." But this proposition, as that of Smith, is true only for relatively modern cities. Ratzel, Anthropogeographie, II, 406, also defines the city as an industrial and commercial center. Sieveking, "Die mittelalterische Stadt, in Vierteljahrschrift für Soc. und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 1904, II, 190, defines it as a center of exchange.

14 See, Etudes d'histoire et d'économie politique, pp. 342, 343. Cantillon held a more correct view when he wrote (Essai sur le commerce, p. 20), "The assemblage of several wealthy proprietors of land, who live together in the same place, suffices to form a city." Sombart would reply that these purely consumers live wholly from the agricultural labor on the outside. But it will be shown in detail farther on that among many peoples agriculture holds a considerable place even in the cities and in their centers. This is a fact too little known.