the tourist, but the historian or the economist too often fail to see
how Galashiels or Bradford are developments of the wool hamlet, now
familiar to many in R.L. Stevenson's native Swanston. Again, not only
Swiss wealth, but Swiss character and institutions, go back essentially
to the high pasture and the well-filled byre. That this rich Swiss
cow-pasture rests on limestone, and the poor Scottish sheep-grazing upon
comparatively unmouldering and impermeable gneiss, is no mere matter of
geologist's detail; it affords in each case the literal and concrete
foundation-stone of the subsequent evolution of each region and
population, and this not only in material and economic development, but
even in higher and subtler outcomes, aesthetic, intellectual and
moral.[4] It is for such reasons that one must labour and re-labour this
geographic and determinist aspect of sociology, and this for no merely
scientific reason, but also for practical ones. Nowhere perhaps have
more good and generous souls considered how to better the condition of
their people than in Swiss, or Irish, or Scottish valleys; yet it is one
main reason of the continual failure of all such movements, and of such
minds in the wider world as well, that they do not first acquaint
themselves with the realities of nature and labour sufficiently to
appreciate that the fundamental--I do not say the supreme--question is:
what can be got out of limestone, and what can be got out of gneiss?
Hence the rare educative value of such a concrete sociological diagram
and model as was the Swiss Village at the Paris Exposition of 1900, for
here geographic and economic knowledge and insight were expressed with
artistic skill and sympathy as perhaps never before. Only as similar
object-lessons are worked out for other countries, can we adequately
learn, much less popularly teach, how from nature comes "rustics," and
from this comes civics. But civics and rustics make up the field of
politics; they are the concrete of which politics become the
abstract--commonly the too remotely abstract.