An historic city too, Halifax fell under the blight of overmuch looking backward, and sociologically the back look has been always recognized as the foe of progress. But she has had a past to be proud of--one which throbs with incident and interest. Born as a military settlement, she has been a garrison city and naval station for more than a hundred and fifty years. She has been called "the stormy petrel among the cities--always to the front in troublous times." She has served and suffered in four hard wars. She has gloried in this wealth of years and storied past. Her traditions have been traditions of royalty, blue blood, dashing officers, church parades, parliamentary ceremonies, fetes, levees and all the splendor and spirit of old colonial times. A newspaper has published daily items of a generation before, and weekly featured a reverie in the past.[154] Old in her years she remained old in her appearance, old in her ways, and in her loves. She boasted old firms which have kept their jubilees, old churches wherein was cradled the religious life of Canada, an old university with a century of service. Each noon a cannon boomed the mid-day hour, and like a curfew sounded in the night. [154] _The Acadian Recorder_, C. C. Blackadar, editor. Search where one will, it would be difficult to find another city which has more completely exhibited the causes of social immobility as set forth by sociology. For there are, it must be remembered, causes of immobility as well as factors of social change. They may be geographical difficulties, or elements more distinctively social--an over-emphasis of government, discouraging innovation, too great a "volume of suggestion," the drag of "collective customs and beliefs," a "traditionalist educational system," the "inheritance of places and functions" tending to arrest development, "government, law, religion and ceremony, hallowed by age."[155] All these reenforce the conservative tendencies in society and preserve the _status quo_.[156] [155] Ross, Edward A., _Foundations of Sociology_ (N. Y., 1905), ch. viii, p. 197. [156] There are other causes of conservatism. A comparative freedom from disasters in the past is one. Halifax has suffered few in her entire history. Indeed the cholera epidemic is the only one of any consequence. She remained one of the last large wooden cities. Her sister city, St. John, was stricken by a disastrous fire and stands to-day safer, more substantial, more progressive in every way. Again communities are generally conservative in character when a large percentage are property-holding people. It was one of the surprises of the Halifax catastrophe that so large a number of citizens were found to own at least in part the homes they lived in.