Page:TheCity.djvu/17

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HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN THE CITY ENVIRONMENT
593
To what extent does the participant in a mass movement feel exaltation or depression? What is the difference in the feelings which accompany financial panics and religious revivals? to what extent are these effects temporary? to what extent are they permanent?
What devices have been used to prevent financial panic? what devices to disperse mobs?


III. SECONDARY RELATIONS AND SOCIAL CONTROL

Modern methods of urban transportation and communication—the electric railway, the automobile, and the telephone—have silently and rapidly changed in recent years the social and industrial organization of the modern city. They have been the means of concentrating traffic in the business districts; have changed the whole character of retail trade, multiplying the residence suburbs and making the department store possible. These changes in the industrial organization and in the distribution of population have been accompanied by corresponding changes in the habits, sentiments, and character of the urban population.

The general nature of these changes is indicated by the fact that the growth of cities has been accompanied by the substitution of indirect, "secondary," for direct, face-to-face, "primary" relations in the associations of individuals in the community.


"By primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face association and co-operation. They are primary in several senses, but chiefly in that they are fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual. The result of intimate association, psychologically, is a certain fusion of individualities in a common whole, so that one's very self, for many purposes at least, is the common life and purpose of the group. Perhaps the simplest way of describing this wholeness is by saying that it is a 'we'; it involves the sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which 'we' is the natural expression. One lives in the feeling of the whole and finds the chief aims of his will in that feeling "[1]

Touch and sight, physical contact, are the basis for the first and most elementary human relationships. Mother and child, husband and wife,father and son, master and servant, kinsman and neighbor, minister, physician, and teacher; these are the most intimate and real relationships of life and in the small community they are practically inclusive.

The interactions which take place among the members of a community so constituted are immediate and unreflecting. Intercourse is carried on largely
  1. Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization, p. 15.