dvances in years. Some
one asked Anna the other day if her Grandmother retained all her
faculties and Anna said, "Yes, indeed, to an alarming degree."
Grandmother knows that we think she is a perfect angel even if she does
seem rather strict sometimes. Whether we are seven or seventeen we are
children to her just the same, and the Bible says, "Children obey your
parents in the Lord for this is right." We are glad that we never will
seem old to her. I had the same company home from church in the evening.
His home is in Naples.

_Christmas, 1860._--I asked Grandmother if Mr. Clarke could take Sunday
night supper with us and she said she was afraid he did not know the
catechism. I asked him Friday night and he said he would learn it on
Saturday so that he could answer every third question anyway. So he did
and got along very well. I think he deserves a pretty good supper.

2. Secondary Contacts and City Life[129]

Modern methods of urban transportation and communication--the electric
railway, the automobile, and the telephone--have silently and rapidly
changed in recent years the social and industrial organization of the
modern city. They have been the means of concentrating traffic in the
business districts; have changed the whole character of retail trade,
multiplying the residence suburbs and making the department store
possible. These changes in the industrial organization and in the
distribution of population have been accompanied by corresponding
changes in the habits, sentiments, and character of the urban
population.

The general nature of these changes is indicated by the fact that the
growth of cities has been accompanied by the substitution of indirect,
"secondary," for direct, face-to-face, "primary" relations in the
associations of individuals in the community.

By primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate
face-to-face association and co-operation. They are primary in
several senses, but chiefly in that they are fundamental in
forming the social nature and ideals of the individual. The
result of intimate association, psychologically, is a certain
fusion of individualities in a common whole, so that one's very
self, for many purposes at least, is the common life and
purpose of the group. Perhaps the simplest way of describing
this wholeness is by saying that it is a "we"; it involves the
sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which "w