As with the family, we may illustrate the significance of Neighbourhood by the case in which it fails to be duly recognised, and that in which nothing else is recognised. To a great extent, in the life of modern cities, especially when supplemented by suburban residence, the principle is disregarded. In a great city, the actual neighbourhood is more than can be dealt with, and has often no distinctive physical character--at least no attractiveness--and the idea of a special relation to it falls away. The fact, indeed, is less universal than is often asserted, and nearness in space, together with local government, retain and will retain a certain predominance over the mind. The total disregard of an ethical purpose connecting us with the surroundings nearest to us in bodily presence, tends to deprive the general life of its vitality, its sensuous health, strength, and beauty. In many ways, circuitous perhaps, but ultimately effective, it may be that this factor of immediacy will regain a proper place in the national mind. We may observe that in as far as electoral districts are treated as mere circumscriptions of such and such numbers of electors, the life of a neighbourhood is disregarded. To make the constituency a mere {310} number (Hare’s scheme) would be the climax of this tendency. In the ancient City-state, on the other hand, the district was all powerful. The State was almost a sensuous fact. The members of the State were essentially friends and neighbours, who for business or pleasure were meeting all day long. When the district thus absorbs the State, there is a want of what we call freedom, though there may be enough of sensuous unconstraint. The State and its ideal purposes are not clearly set above all flesh and blood. A great legal system is not created till the State ceases to be a neighbourhood. Individual intimacy [1] and the “hard case” obscure the idea of universal law. The possibility of representative government, of a political faith which does not work by sight, is not conceived. The district, as a natural fact, was at first only a degree more liberating than the natural fact of kinship. [2] It was not conceived that man, as man, belonged “neither to this place nor to Jerusalem.” With the ideal unity of a modern nation such conceptions harmonise much more readily, and the neighbourhood can lend them flesh and blood without hiding them. [1] Imagine a Roman or English judge being addressed as Demosthenes, in his speech against Pantaenetus, addressed (in his client’s name) the Athenian jury: “I know I have a hurried gait and a loud voice, and it annoys people; but I am as I was made, and I have a right to justice all the same.” It sounds like a speech to a jury of schoolboys. [2] P. 300 above.