538 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
Other writers, among them Riimelin, have made use of demo- graphical characteristics and have defined the city for example by the lowness of its birth-rate or by its high marriage-rate. But he himself recognizes that these characteristics are by no means exclusive. The demography of the great city resembles that of the farm ; that of the small city resembles that of the village.® More- over the demographical qualities of the city are not sufficiently stable to characterize it. They vary with changes in the size of the city, as well as according to the period and the community. Thus in the Middle Ages the city death-rate was lower than that of the country. At the time of Graunt the reverse was true. At the present time there is again a tendency, due to other causes, toward an urban death-rate lower than that of the country. On the other hand, the birth-rate of the city, which is ordinarily lower than the rural birth-rate, sometimes tends to surpass the latter.^
The juridical definitions^^ are subject to the same defect that certain morphological definitions have. They are valid for certain types of cities only. Furthermore the juridical character- istics of the city are not universal even in a given social situation. The right of municipality {droit municipal) or the right of trade
deutschen Stadtwesens, pp. 30, 33. That most of the ancient Gennan villages were fortified has already been remarked by Roscher (Sconomie politique rurale [Nationalokonomik des Ackerbaues und der verwandten Urproduktionen'i, pp. 299, 300), who with Justi considers the village "a product of the age of the right of the strongest;" Gomme, The Village Community, pp. 122, 123; Stubbs {Constitutional History of England, I, chap, v [French translation, I, loi, note 5, and 114]), even claims that the term township which applies to the village as to the city, comes from the woven hedge or tun which surrounded all the villages that did not possess a wall proper. See, on the matter of forti- fied villages of the neolithic age, J. de Morgan, Les premieres civilisations, itude sur la prehistoire et I'histoire, 1909, p. 152.
• Rumelin, "Ville et campagne," in ProbUmes d'iconomie politique et de statistique, pp. 210-12.
•Thus in Massachusetts and in Sweden. See, Henderson, "Are Modern Industry and City Life Unfavorable to the Family?" American Journal of Sociology, XIV, 671.
"Justi has defined the city by the existence of a council {Stadtrat). But many villages of the Middle Ages had an organ of that sort, as the panchayat of the Hindu village of the present. The city has also been defined by the specialness of its law, by the ensemble of its privileges (see, Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 173), what the Germans have called its "Privilegierung."
