376 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
contemporaneous tendency toward expansion which is making itself felt on the part of all the larger states of Europe.
The greatest concentration of political forces is reached in cities, for in them space is eliminated out of the list of political obstructions ; hence they show, with stormy adjustment of inter- nal differences, the most rapid development to centers of power, towering far above the wide domain beneath them. The phases of intellectual progress which find their best conditions in the closely associated activities of many people are characteristic of such foci in particular. The transition from the mythological to the scientific age — an epoch in the history of mankind — was accomplished first in small Greek colonial towns, thriving by their trade on new soil, and with limited space. Commerce, which, according to its nature, promotes the development of such places of preeminence or seeks its support in them, favors this early maturity, depositing in it at the same time the never- failing seeds of decay. So long as there have been great cities, they have outstripped their countries in good and evil. The role of Paris in the history of revolutions is nothing new. To be .sure, the quick tempo of political changes in France was due in part to the national character, but also in part to the lack of the obstructions afforded by mere distance in the twenty-nine square miles of the capital, Paris. A great number of the famous Ital- ian and German trading towns of the Middle Ages, with the expansion of their commerce, rapidly attained the size and pop- ulation at which they then remained for five hundred years. Liibeck grew with the rapidity of a New York or Chicago. After Henry the Lion had changed it from a provincial town of Hol- stein to the chief port of his duchy, it stood for a hundred years at the top of the North German cities, and only all-powerful Cologne could be compared with it. In regard to the Hanse towns, Dietrich Schafer advances the supposition that, in the first century after they were founded, in most cases they already embraced the area which they then retained, till in the present time the totally different phenomenon of the universal growth of population brought to them also an increase. We can, there- fore, speak of a development centuries ahead of its time. And
