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or State may increase its numbers to nearly ten thousand; but unless it becomes a railway junction as at Salisbury, or a brickworks as at Peterborough, or a factory centre, as at Lincoln, it will seldom grow much more. But if it does become a railway centre or a factory town, it is no longer self-contained: it sells its goods to the outer world, throws out suburbs to house its increasing population, and thus takes the first step on the road which ends in the great capital cities of the world.

Trade and traffic, like the majority of human beings, follow the line of least resistance to the great town; finance follows suit, and centralizes itself, like the government, in an administrative · capital; and the suburb, whether in London or Glasgow, in Leeds or Liverpool, is a necessary consequence of this concentration of business in one point. The only reason that all roads led to Rome was that all men wanted to go there, and it is the same in modern England. It is easier to get from Oxford to Cambridge by way of London than across country; quicker to get from Glasgow to Harwich by way of Euston than York; and there is a story that Kipling's "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," was inspired by the practical impossibility of making a connection between the North-Western and the Great Eastern Railways otherwise than by coming to the metropolis.

Cobbett saw this tendency of population to become concentrated in great cities-which he attributed, like all other evils, to the national debt created by the Whig philosophy, the Tory Government, and the Jews-and foretold ruin from its continuance. The nineteenth century laughed at his forebodings, but strangely enough the gist of his prophecies has recently been repeated by a German historian, who holds that the great city is the culminating phase of every civilization, the final expression of national energy which precedes its inevitable decay. Spengler writes with far less natural grace and style than Cobbett; but in his determinist philosophy States wax and multiply, decline and fall, by predestined law; and there are two separate and distinct signs of the approach towards degradation and decay-the formation of the great city at home and an outburst of colonising activity abroad.

If that is so, our case is serious indeed. But the prophecies of historians are not necessarily more infallible than those of

politicians, which are seldom true; and people who have given some little attention to the details of colonial history may be inclined to regard oversea expansion as an indication of the surplus energy of national youth rather than a proof of State senescence. Nor do the somewhat dubious instances in point quoted by Spengler in the least convince one to the contrary. At any rate, if colonisation is indicative of the approaching demise of England, it must at least be admitted that we are an unconscionable time dying.

The case for regarding the great city with its suburbs as an indication of national weakness and decadence seems at first sight less insecure. Throughout history the great State and the great city have had their spell of splendour and in time decayed. Babylon and Carthage may be but forerunners of London and New York; Nineveh and Tyre the ancestors of a derelict Glasgow and an abandoned Chicago.

But history does not necessarily repeat itself when conditions change. The great city, it is true, is subject to the eternal weakness that it cannot feed itself. But in one respect at least its position to-day is entirely different from that of its predecessors in history. Its size and suburbs are both unprecedented, but both are due to a series of revolutions in transport, also without precedent in the world's history.

Ultimately the limit of size of the great city must depend on the speed and cost of transport, which conditions both its business and its population; and of these two factors speed is probably slightly more important than cost. It is not indeed the cost of transporting the produce it consumes or distributes this is practically a negligible item when New Zealand butter can be sold as cheaply in London as salt Dorset-but the speed and cost of transporting its daily workers to and from home and office that matters; and here undoubtedly speed is the dominant factor. The price of a season ticket certainly rises as one travels outwards from the centre, but it does not rise in proportion to the distance, and the cost is very largely compensated by the sharp drop in rents between town and country. But speed is practically decisive, for the man who works the normal eight hours a day in office, shop, or factory finds anything much more than an hour spent in travelling inwards-that is to say, two hours a day out and home-takes too much out of the day, and involves too much waste of time and wear and tear.

A glance back over urban history shows this time-factor to have been always the limiting distance of the outer suburb. The cost of transport has steadily fallen as its speed has risen, but the length of night and day remains obstinately the same throughout the ages. Mrs. Newcome's chariot probably took the best part of an hour in its stately progress from Clapham to the City a hundred years ago; the Thrales, whose horses were presumably less overfed and quicker between the shafts, could afford to live farther out at Streatham. When the railway was built, Sir John Lubbock could take train to Beckenham or Bromley, and drive out to his house at Downe. Westerham, however, a few miles away on a branch line, with a miserable railway service, would have been inaccessible to the banker; but the motor-car made it possible for Mr. Winston Churchill.

The express train is faster and cheaper than the motor-car, and therefore the season-ticket holder can live farther out than the daily motorist. But fifty miles an hour is practically the limit for express trains on the crowded tracks near London, and therefore fifty miles from the centre is practically the limit of the outer suburbs Brighton and Southend are the typical examples to-day. Beyond that distance the number of daily travellers rapidly diminishes.

Every revolution of transport has pushed the suburbs farther out and, by increasing facilities for travel, has in turn increased the concentration of business and congestion at the centre. But there is no particular reason to suppose that the process is at an end. A hundred years ago it was thought extraordinary to travel by coach from York to Liverpool in a day; it is now possible to leave Inverness after an early breakfast, and arrive in London for a late supper, by steam. But the slowest aeroplane already beats the fastest train, and a hundred years hence aircraft may travel two hundred miles an hour as easily and comfortably as an express train to-day does its mile a minute. Should that be so, the outer limits of London would no longer be Brighton and Berkhampstead, but Barnstaple and Bettws-y-coed, and eligible suburban sites on Plynlimmon would advertise the quality of their fresh air against the attractions of Palmer's Green and Peckham.

Revolutions of this kind were not contemplated by Cobbett when he denounced the growth of the wen; nor do they seem to have been taken into account by Spengler in his apocalyptic

description of the inevitable doom of great cities as the final chapter of a decadent civilisation. The problem is in fact more complex, for the dominance of the town over the country has had another and very unexpected result.

Fifty years ago, even thirty years ago, it was true that the townsman was physically at a disadvantage when compared with the countryman. His life was shorter, his children were less wellnourished, more subject to epidemics, and far more likely to struggle through life at a lower level of energy than the rural worker. But physically as well as economically the balance of power has slowly but steadily inclined away from the country to the town. A hundred years back, Cobbett noticed that the agricultural labourers who produced the best food were the least well-fed, that they had what was left after the pick of the fields was sent to town. The best corn, the best beef, the best fruit, the best cheese, went to London; the remainder, the mere dregs and ullage of the brew, was retained for those who raised the crop. It followed that in time the more ambitious and intelligent youth left the country for the towns, where opportunities were greater; and in three or four generations this double selection of the physically fit, and of the best food, for the urban or suburban population has produced its inevitable result.

It is the towns that produce the criminals, the hooligans, the apaches; but it is also the towns that produce the intellectual and physical leaders of the race. It is in the decaying village of the remote countryside that one finds the under-nourished, the degenerate, the weakling, and the sub-normal. The old tradition that no cockney family survived three generations may or may not have been true in the days when the plague was a recent and recurrent memory. But it is a mere legend to-day, when the physical level of the residential suburbs is, on the whole, higher and better than that of the rural districts. The country is still insanitary, but the town has main drainage; the country may have the pure air, but the town drinks the pure water.

It is true that these conditions may not remain permanent; power may yet flow back from the town to the country, our suburbs decay and our cottages flourish. But there are no signs yet of such a reversal; and the world-wide process of urbanization shows itself ultimately as not so much a cause as an effect. The concentration of population in one central spot is the result, not

of lack of transport, but of the advance of transport; it is not because men cannot move, but because they can, that the tide of life flows and ebbs in the City of London. Congestion results from ease of distribution, not from its lack; it is a consequence of speed, not of absence of speed.

Now, speed is the result of improvements in locomotion. And it is a significant fact that although men have made and lost empires, have founded and forgotten cultures, creeds, and civilizations, there is one thing they have never lost and never forgotten the love of speed. Arts have died out and philosophies been superseded through the ages, but no invention that has improved the mobility of man in his struggle with nature has ever been rejected, and no advance in locomotion has ever been lost. The great city is a consequence of these improvements and that advance; the village, the town, the capital, and finally its suburbs, are all successive and unconscious monuments to our inward urge to speed. For that reason the great city seems likely to be a permanent factor in human society.

A. WYATT TILBY

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