If from the Outlook Tower he dreams of an idealised Edinburgh he has only to reply to the scoffer who asks, “What have you done?” “Circumspice!” There stand the settlements he initiated, the houses beautiful, bright, delectable; and the tower itself is an embodiment of his ideas, an encyclopaedia in stone and in storeys.

We must, in criticising this paper, take into account these attempts towards realisation of its principles.  The sociological evolutionist is “concerned primarily with origins, but ultimately and supremely with ideals,” we were reminded in a recent paper read before this Society.  And in the same paper it was affirmed that, “through the formulation of its larger generalisations as ideals, sociology may hope to achieve the necessary return from theory to practice.”  Thus, if Civics is applied Sociology, we must rest its claims on these criteria.  What, then, we have to ask is:—­(1) What actually are the generalisations of the present paper? (2) How far they are warranted by verifiable sociological testimony, and (3) What results do they yield when transformed by the touch of emotion into ideals of action?  To attempt an adequate answer to these questions would perhaps transcend the limits of this discussion.  But merely to raise these questions of presupposition should tend to clarify the discussion.  Coming to detail, I may say, as one whose occupation is demographic, I regret the unavoidable briefness of the reference in “Civics” to a “rationalised census of the present condition of the people.”

[Page:  135] No one, however, who has studied the concluding portion of “The Evolution of Sex” can accuse Prof.  Geddes of ignoring questions of population; and his eulogium, written ten years ago, of “Mr. Charles Booth as one of our own latest and best Economists,” is familiar to all readers of “Education for Economics and Citizenship.”  In that extremely suggestive treatise, Prof.  Geddes further points out that population must have a primary place in consideration, and that “our studies of the characteristic occupation of region by region are the essential material of a study of its whole civilisation.”

Accepting Mr. Branford’s definition of occupation as “any and every form of human endeavour, past, present, and future,” we see that occupation must have a large place in the description, explanation, and forecasting of the evolution of cities—­such as Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee—­in the scheme of survey outlined so sweepingly in “Civics.”

“Life and Labour of the People in London” contains several general observations almost equally applicable to our largest Scottish cities, with the demographic conditions of which my official duties give me special opportunities for becoming familiar and for regional survey.

In the concluding volume of that great contribution to sociology Mr. Booth (page 23) remarks:—­

“Many influences conspire to cause the poor to multiply almost in proportion to their poverty, and operate in the other direction in the case of the better off, almost in proportion to their wealth.  But,” says Mr. Booth, “when we bring the death-rate into account this law no longer holds.”