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001 77444
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040 _aUtSlPG
041 7 _aen
_2iso639-1
050 4 _aCB
100 1 _aCram, Ralph Adams,
_d1863-1942
245 1 0 _aWalled towns
264 1 _aSalt Lake City, UT :
_bProject Gutenberg,
_c2025
300 _a1 online resource :
_bmultiple file formats
336 _atext
_btxt
_2rdacontent
337 _acomputer
_bc
_2rdamedia
338 _aonline resource
_bcr
_2rdacarrier
500 _aRelease date is 2025-12-11
508 _aCharlene Taylor, chenzw, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
520 _a"Walled towns" by Ralph Adams Cram is a social critique and reformist essay written in the early 20th century. It argues that the remedy for industrial modernity’s ugliness and moral drift is a network of spiritually grounded, guild-based, largely self-sufficient “walled towns” that combine medieval civic form with practical modern needs. Rejecting both reactionary restoration and revolutionary chaos, the work proposes a third path built on small human scale, justice, and a sacramental philosophy. The opening of this work contrasts the colour, order, and fresh air of a medieval walled city with the grime, noise, and vulgarity of an industrial station and slum, then turns to the postwar question, “What is the way out?” It dismisses the false choice between restoring prewar civilization and embracing Bolshevism, and rejects mechanistic fixes—mass democracy, state socialism, pacifist internationalism—arguing instead for small units, value over quantity, and a revived monastic spirit adapted to family life. The author sketches principles for new communities: justice first, cooperation over competition, production for use, severe limits on usury, landholding as the basis of citizenship, and controlled membership. He then offers a tour of an exemplar, Beaulieu: motors stopped at the gate, symbolic civic pageantry, a parish church at the center, a provost-and-council government of landholding burgesses, land-rent taxation without public debt, courts of conciliation, and an economy organized by guilds that favor crafts, shared mills, and water power. Education is inseparable from religion, honours genuine talent, and feeds a rich common culture of music, drama, and festivals; museums give way to art embedded in daily life. Social distinctions rest on mastery, academies, and knighthood for service, not money or mass power. The section closes by declaring the walled towns a deliberate alternative to nineteenth‑century democracy, socialism, and their anarchic offshoots. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
534 _pOriginally published:
_cBoston: Marshall Jones Company, 1919
653 _aCivilization, Medieval
653 _aCulture
653 _aProgress
653 _aSocial history
856 4 _uhttps://archive.org/details/walledtowns00cram/page/n5/mode/2up
856 4 0 _uhttps://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77444
999 _c118164
_d118164