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March 9, 1883

 


Pet cemeteries in Victorian England are what occupy us today. The following quotation, from 
Lectures on the industrial revolution of the 18th century in England (1884) has the main theme of the nature of groups in urban settings. Perhaps you will find the following quotation as interesting as I did:

All co-operators follow their great founder in denouncing individualism and the principle of competition; but I have recently observed among some social reformers a certain impatience and distrust of that opposite principle of association to which cooperators have so long looked for the ultimate regeneration of our social system. Though we may not attach much importance to this feeling, we cannot deny its existence. We recognise it in sarcastic descriptions of the motley throng of societies which jostle each other in modern civilisation, from societies for the salvation of souls and the spread of the gospel among the heathen, down to associations for the reform of bread, the promotion of early rising, and the burial of dead cats! It is hinted in these descriptions that most modern societies are trivial and ridiculous, or mere vexatious impediments to healthy individual action; and a comparison is sometimes instituted between them and the mediaeval guilds, [the word medieval had negative connotations in this era] much to their disadvantage. The criticism is not entirely undeserved, nor the contrast entirely false. Putting aside great commercial companies, which are avowedly associations of capital trading for profit, we must, I think, admit that a large number of modern organisations are simply aggregates of money, with trivial or transient objects, instead of being, like the mediaeval guilds, living groups of men animated by common principles of religious and industrial faith, and united for the satisfaction of the great permanent needs of human life.

I shall not here pause to consider the reason of this difference, but the comparison and the criticism will be of value if they lead us to ask what is the real function of the innumerable associations of the present age. A careful examination will prove that though, not a few are useless and ridiculous, the majority of them are the legitimate products of the extraordinary variety of men's wants and aims, which, under the complex conditions of modern social life, it is beyond the power of the individual to satisfy or achieve. The Animals Necropolis Company, to which I have alluded, seems at first sight to be properly included under those societies which are foolish and useless, but it is in reality a fair if quaint illustration of the truth of the assertion I have just made. The tenderness for animals as companions, the crowding together of dwellings in great cities without a foot of vacant space, the strictness of modern sanitary regulations, are facts which explain and justify the existence of a society so apparently repugnant to common sense. 

These paragraphs were written by Arnold Toynbee (August 23, 1852  to March 9, 1883). Toynbee was a historian, who first popularized the whole idea of an industrial revolution. He is the uncle of the Arnold Toynbee who wrote the multiple volume Study of History.

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