tem. They are towns that have grown
up in a state of profound peace, and that imply advanced means of
communication, with a free interchange of agricultural and manufactured
products.

Hence in America it is always quite easy to see at a glance the _raison
d'etre_ of every town or village one comes across. New York, Boston,
Philadelphia, Baltimore--New Orleans, Montreal, San Francisco,
Charleston--are all great ports for the exportation of corn, pork,
'lumber,' cotton, or tobacco, and the importation of European
manufactured goods. Chicago is the main collecting and distributing
centre for the wide basin of the upper Great Lakes, as Cincinnati is
for the Ohio Valley, and St. Louis for the Mississippi and Missouri
confluents. Pittsburg bases itself upon its coal and its iron; Buffalo
exists as the point of transfer where elevators raise the corn of
Chicago from lake-going vessels into the long, low barges of the Erie
Canal. In every case, in that newest of worlds, one can see for oneself
at a glance exactly why so large a body of human beings has collected
just at that precise spot, and at no other.

But when you have toiled up, hot and breathless, through olive and
pine, from the Viale at Florence to the antique Cyclopean walls of
Etruscan Faesulae, you wonder to yourself, like our American friend, as
you pant on the terrace of the Romanesque cathedral, what on earth they
could ever have wanted to build a town up there for, anyway.

If we look away from Tuscany to our own England, however, we shall find
on many a deserted down or lonely tor ample evidence of the causes
which led the people of this ancient Etruscan town to build their
citadel at so great a height above the neighbouring valley. Fiesole,
says Dante, in a well-known verse, was the mother of Florence. Even so
in England, Old Sarum was indeed the mother of Salisbury, and Caer
Badon or Sulis was the mother of Bath. And when there was first a
Faesulae on the hill here there could be no Florence, as when first there
was an Old Sarum on the Wiltshire downs there could be no Salisbury,
and when first there was a Caer Badon on the heights of Avon there
could be no Bath.

In very early times indeed, in the European land area, when men began
first to gather together into towns or villages, two necessities
determined their choice of a place to dwell in: first, food-supply
(including water); and second, defence. Hence every early community
stands, to start with, n