ABSTRACT
People do not necessarily live easily together. The true mark of our progress should be looked for less in great technological, scientific or medical change and more in the vast urban conglomerations where people still struggle to live and work together in harmony. That it is a struggle, and one whose outcome seems more uncertain as we approach the second millennium, should not cause us to join the doomsayers, but rather to see what we can learn from the age-old struggle. Obsession with the past has always been a dangerous occupation since it encourages the belief in myths. It suits the temperament of many of our current political leaders to posit the fairy tale of a past golden age. It is not quite clear when it was-forty, fifty, sixty years ago? Or perhaps, given their clearly expressed belief in free markets and liberal capitalism, they long for a return to the early and mid-nineteenth century when those doctrines swept all before them; when Manchester, the ‘shock city of the age’ so delighted Disraeli that he put this encomium into the mouth of one of his characters:
This was a rather different view from the frightening picture painted by other visitors to that archetypal industrial city-commentators such as Engels, de Tocqueville, and Faucher who looked beyond the developing factories, the overflowing warehouses and the wealthy merchants’ houses to see a place where men, women and children strove to survive in unbelievably bad conditions. From their views, the aura of disease, decay and doom would cling to the city and particularly to those cities which grew as a result of industrial
change. This perception would be exacerbated as those who made money out of the industrial changes moved out of the cities into the apparently desirable countryside.
