The evils of existing city life are thus largely reinterpreted; and if so more efficiently combated; since the poverty, squalor and ugliness of our cities, their disease and their intemperance, their ignorance, dulness and mental defect, their vice and crime are thus capable not only of separate treatment but of an increasingly unified civic hygiene, and this in the widest sense, material and moral, economic and idealist, utilitarian and artistic. Even the most earnest and capable workers towards civic betterment in these many fields may gain at once in hope and in efficiency as they see their special interests and tasks converging into the conception of the city as an organic unity, and this not fixed and settled, nor even in process of progress or degeneration from causes beyond our ken, but as an orderly development which we may aid towards higher perfection, geographic and cultural alike. Our modern town is thus in a very real sense, one not hopeless, but as hopeful as may be, a veritable purgatory; that is a struggle of lower and higher idealisms, amid the respective expressions and outcomes of these. Indeed, in our own present [Page: 97] cities, as they have come to be, is not each of us ever finding his own Inferno, or it may be his Paradise? Does he not see the dark fate of some, the striving and rising hope of others, the redemption also? The supreme poetic utterance of the mediaeval world is thus in great measure, as each thoughtful reader sees, an expression of impassioned citizenship and this at one of the golden moments of the long history of city life. This expression--this exiled citizen's autobiographic thought-stream--is resumed at every level, from youthful home and local colour, from boyish love and hopes, from active citizenship and party struggle, to the transfiguration of all these. Hence these mystic visions, and these world ambitions, temporal and spiritual; hence this rise from cloistered faith and philosophy into many-sided culture; hence the transformation of all these through intensest symbol-visions into enduring song. Am I thus suggesting the _Divina Comedia_ as a guide-book to cities? Without doubt, though not necessarily for beginners. Yet who can see Florence without this, though we may pack below it Baedeker and Murray? Or who, that can really read, can open a volume of Mr. Booth's severely statistical Survey of London, with all its studious reserve, its scientific repression, without seeing between its lines the Dantean circles; happy if he can sometimes read them upward as well as down? O--A CIVIC SYMBOL AND ITS MEANING