ase his social environment remains restricted. His
relations are with nature rather than with men. His horizon is narrow,
his interests limited. The institutions that mould him are few, the
forces that stimulate to progress are likely to be lacking altogether.
He need not, but he usually does, cease to grow.

178. =Characteristics of the City.=--Certain individuals find the
static life of the country unbearable. Their nature demands larger
scope in an expanding environment. To them the stirring town beckons,
and they are restless until they escape. The city is a centre of
social life where the individual feels a greater stimulus than in the
home or the rural community. It resembles the family and the village
in providing social relations and an interchange of ideas, but it
surpasses them in the large scale of its activities. It presents many
of the same social characteristics that they do, but geared in each
case for higher speed. Its activities are swifter and more varied. Its
associations are more numerous and kaleidoscopic. Its people are less
independent than in the country; control, economic and political, is
more pervasive, even though crude in method. Change is more rapid in
the city, because the forces that are at work are charged with dynamic
energy. Weakness in social structure and functioning is conspicuous.
In the large cities all these are intensified, but they are everywhere
apparent whenever a community passes beyond the village stage. The
line that separates the village or small town from the city is an
arbitrary one. The United States calls those communities rural that
have a population not exceeding twenty-five hundred, but it is less a
question of population than of interests and activities. When
agriculture gives place to trade or manufacturing as the leading
economic interest; when the community takes on the social
characteristics that belong to urban life; and when places of business
and amusement assume a place of importance rather than the home, the
school, and the church, the community passes into the urban class.
Names and forms of government are of small consequence in
classification compared with the spirit and ways of the community.

179. =How the City Grows.=--The city grows by the natural excess of
births over deaths and by immigration. Without immigration the city
grows more slowly but more wholesomely. Immigration introduces an
alien element that has to adjust itself to new ways and doe