on; partly because the
field is smaller. In small communities there is a perfectly amazing
amount of personal information afloat among the individuals who compose
them.

The absence of this in the city is what, in large part, makes the city
what it is.

4. From Sentimental to Rational Attitudes[131]

I can imagine it to be of exceeding great interest to write the history
of mankind from the point of view of the stranger and his influence on
the trend of events. From the earliest dawn of history we may observe
how communities developed in special directions, no less in important
than in insignificant things, because of influences from without. Be it
religion or technical inventions, good form in conduct or fashions in
dress, political revolutions or stock-exchange machinery, the impetus
always--or, at least, in many cases--came from strangers. It is not
surprising, therefore, that in the history of the intellectual and
religious growth of the bourgeois the stranger should play no small
part. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages in Europe, and to a large
extent in the centuries that followed, families left their homes to set
up their hearths anew in other lands. The wanderers were in the majority
of cases economic agents with a strongly marked tendency toward
capitalism, and they originated capitalist methods and cultivated them.
Accordingly, it will be helpful to trace the interaction of migrations
and the history of the capitalist spirit.

First, as to the facts themselves. Two sorts of migrations may be
distinguished--those of single individuals and those of groups. In the
first category must be placed the removal, of their own free will, of a
family, or it may even be of a few families, from one district or
country to another. Such cases were universal. But we are chiefly
concerned with those instances in which the capitalist spirit manifested
itself, as we must assume it did where the immigrants were acquainted
with a more complex economic system or were the founders of new
industries. Take as an instance the Lombards and other Italian
merchants, who in the early Middle Ages carried on business in England,
France, and elsewhere. Or recall how in the Middle Ages many an
industry, more especially silk weaving, that was established in any
district was introduced by foreigners, and very often on a capitalist
basis. "A new phase in the development of the Venetian silk industry
began with the arrival of traders a