Note 2 — Chapter II · THE DOCKS

It is interesting to observe that in this, as in so many other matters (the strength of her civic spirit, for instance; the nature of her municipal exploits; the conspicuous attention she is giving to the specifically urban problem of the Housing of the Poor; her constant devotion to the specifically urban business of locomotion), the abnormal circumstances of Liverpool’s growth have made her an unusually faithful embodiment of certain of the most essential of modern urban impulses. She is, as I have said, boldly different; and it is of the body of that difference that she should be thus clearly representative: there being nothing, in actuality, quite so exceptional as the typical. On the one hand, that is to say, she is exceptional because she is typical; on the other, she is typical because she is exceptional.