MACHINERY AND THE MODERN TOWN.
Sec. 1. _The Modern Industrial Town as a Machine-product._
Sec. 2. _Growth of Town as compared with Rural Population in the Old
and New Worlds._
Sec. 3. _Limits imposed upon the Townward Movement by the Economic
Conditions of World-industry._
Sec. 4. _Effect of increasing Town-life upon Mortality._
Sec. 5. _The impaired quality of Physical Life in Towns._
Sec. 6. _The Intellectual Education of Town-life._
Sec. 7. _The Moral Education of Town-life._
Sec. 8. _Economic Forces making for Decentralisation._
Sec. 9. _Desirability of Public Control of Transport Services to
effect Decentralisation._
Sec. 10. _Long Hours and Insecurity of Work as Obstacles to Reforms._
Sec. 11. _The Principle of Internal Reform of Town-life._
Sec. 1. In the last few chapters we have examined some of the influences
of modern machine-production upon men and women in the capacity of
producers, in relation to character, duration, intensity, regularity
of employment, the remuneration of labour, and the economic relations
which subsist between workers and employers. It remains to give
special consideration to one factor in the environment of modern
industrial life, which is of paramount importance upon the public,
both in its working and living capacity.
The biggest, and in some respects the most characteristic of
machine-products is the modern industrial town. Steam-power is in a
most literal sense the maker of the modern town. When the motive-power
of industrial work was chiefly confined to the forces stored in man,
the economy obtained by collecting larger numbers of men to work in
close proximity to one another was comparatively small, and was
commonly outweighed by the difficulty of securing for them a
sufficient supply of food and other commodities, and by the greater
immobility of labour at a time when fixed local associations were a
strong binding force, and transport was slow and expensive. When the
earlier machinery drew its motive-power chiefly from water, the local
attachment and wide distribution of this power prevented the
concentration of industry from advancing very far. Only in proportion
as steam-power became the dominating agent did the economies of
factory-production drive the workers to crowd ever more densely in the
districts where coal and water for generating steam were most
accessible, and to throng together for the most economical use of
steam-power in industry.
This rapid appreciation of the economies of centralised production,
heedless of all considerations, sanitary, aesthetic, moral, found a
hasty business expression in these huge hideous conglomerations of
factory buildings, warehouses, and cheap workmen's shelters, which
make the modern industrial town. The requirements of a decent,
healthy, harmonious individual or civic life played no appreciable
part in the rapid transformation of the mediaeval residential centre,
or the scattered industrial village into the modern manufacturing
town. Considerations of cheap profitable work were paramount;
considerations of life were almost utterly ignored. So swift,
heedless, anarchic has this process been, that no adequate provisions
were made for securing the prime conditions of healthy, physical
existence required to maintain the workers in the most profitable
state of working efficiency. Only of recent years in a few of the
larger manufacturing towns has some slow revival of the idea of civic
life, as distinct from the organised manipulation of municipal affairs
for selfish business purposes, begun to manifest itself. The typical
modern town is still a place of workshops, not of homes.
Transport-machinery, the railway and the steamship, have been almost as
important factors in the making of towns as manufacturing-machinery. By
easily, quickly, and cheaply bringing food from a distance, they make
town work and town life upon a large scale possible; by imparting
increased fluidity to capital and labour, they continually increase the
economic advantages of highly concentrated industry. In the opening up
of new countries like the United States and Australia, the railway is
the literal maker of the town, in older countries it is the chief
alimental channel.
The pace at which this concentration of population in large towns
proceeds is the most serviceable measurement of the progress which the
various parts of the industrial world are making in machine-industry.
There are changes other than those of industrial method which help the
townward movement. The spirit of curiosity and enterprise stimulated
by education and the newspaper press, a desire for freer and more
varied social intercourse, a love of sensation and amusement, a
seeking after culture and intellectual development, in some cases the
mere promptings of idleness, discontent, or even criminal desires,
drive an increasing proportion of the younger rural population towards
the towns. But it is the combination of industrial changes in which
machinery plays the central part--the increased application of
machinery to agriculture reducing the demand for agricultural labour,
the development of manufacturing industries in towns, the labour of
transport and distribution requiring centralised machinery--that makes
this movement physically and economically feasible. The shift in the
proportionate demand for labour in towns and in country attributable
to machine-production is a principal direct agent in the movement.
Sec. 2. In England, _par excellence_ the manufacturing country, the
growth of the town as compared with the country is strongly marked
during the last thirty years.
1861. 1871. 1881. 1891.
Urban Population[267] 62.3 64.8 66.6 71.7
Rural " 37.7 35.2 33.4 28.3
During the decennium 1881-91 there was a considerable check in the
immigration from the country into the large towns, though the
proportion of townsfolk to country folk grew even more rapidly than in
the preceding ten years.[268]
In Holland and Belgium, notwithstanding a large migration to foreign
lands, the towns grow far quicker than the total population. Thus in
Holland in the period 1870-79 the towns increased 17.25, while the
rural districts only increased 6.8. In Belgium, where the emigration
across the border is still larger, there is a tide of migration of the
parochial or country population continually setting towards Antwerp,
Brussels, and Liege.[269]
[Illustration: GROWTH OF FRENCH POPULATION.]
This flow of population to the towns is not affected to any
considerable extent either by the rate of growth of the population
itself or by the small stake in the land possessed by the bulk of the
agricultural population in such a country as England. For in France,
where the growth of population during the last half century has been
extremely slow, and where the majority of the agriculturists have a
definite stake in the soil, the growth of the town population is most
remarkable. In Germany also, where peasant-proprietors are very
numerous, the towns continually absorb a larger proportion of the
population. In 1871 the urban population of the empire was 36.1 per
cent. of the total, in 1885 it was 41.8 per cent. In Austria, Hungary,
Sweden, Italy, a similar movement is clearly traceable. The above
diagram relating to movements of French population indicates that
Paris has been growing more rapidly than other French towns. In other
industrial countries also it is found that the pace of growth varies
for the most part directly with the size of the town. In England, it
is true that the largest cities show during the last decennium a
certain slackening in the pace of growth. But the towns between 20,000
and 100,000 are still growing far more rapidly than those between
5,000 and 20,000, while those below 5,000 fail to keep pace with the
general rise of population. This fact obtains the clearest recognition
in the preliminary report of the census of 1891.[270] "The urban
population increases then very much more rapidly than the rural
population. And not only so, but the larger, or rather the more
populous the urban districts,[271] and the more decided therefore its
urban character, the higher, generally speaking and with many
individual exceptions, is the rate of growth."
The movement is then not merely to town life, but to large-town life.
The following diagram shows the rate of growth of the chief European
centres of population during the present century:--
[Illustration]
The figures relating to Germany are peculiarly instructive upon this
point:--
GERMANY--RATE OF INCREASE OF GOVERNMENT DISTRICTS.[272]
+-----------+------------------------------------+
| | Times in which such rate occurred. |
| Per Cent. |-----------------+------------------+
| | Town Districts. | Rural Districts. |
+-----------+-----------------+------------------+
| Increase. | | |
| 30 | 3 | -- |
| 25-30 | 2 | -- |
| 20-25 | 10 | 1 |
| 15-20 | 33 | 2 |
| 11-15 | 65 | -- |
| 9-11 | 55 | 4 |
| 5-9 | 50 | 35 |
| 3-5 | 8 | 69 |
| 1-3 | -- | 56 |
| 0-1 | 1 | 28 |
| Decrease. | | |
| 1-0 | 1 | 18 |
| 3-1 | -- | 22 |
| 5-3 | -- | 3 |
| 0-5 | -- | 4 |
+-----------+-----------------+------------------+
--------------------+------------+------------+------------------
German Empire. | 1871. | 1886. | Rate of Increase.
--------------------+------------+------------+------------------
Towns over 100,000 | 1,968,000 | 3,327,000 | 69 per cent.
" " 20,000 | 3,147,000 | 4,147,000 | 31 "
" " 5,000 | 4,588,000 | 5,694,000 | 24 "
" " 2,000 | 5,086,000 | 5,734,000 | 12 "
Rural Population | 26,219,000 | 26,318,000 | 3 "
--------------------+------------+------------+------------------
But the movement is by no means confined to the densely-populated
countries of Europe. If we turn to the "new world" we find it
illustrated still more remarkably. In the United States of America,
long before the population approached its present height, and while
large tracts of fertile land still remained to be parcelled out, the
towns began to absorb more and more of the population. The following
diagram will show this movement to have been continuous, and with a
gathering momentum as the century moved on:--
[Illustration: GROWTH OF CITY POPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES.]
What holds of the United States holds also of the newly settled
countries with small populations, as New South Wales, Victoria,
Canada, and even Manitoba,[273] Argentina, and Uruguay. Nearly
one-third of the whole population of New South Wales is resident in
Sydney, and a fourth of the population of Queensland in Brisbane.
Victoria presents the most striking case. In 1881 its four largest
towns contained more than two-fifths of the whole population,
Melbourne alone holding one-third.
In Canada there is the same diminution of rural and growth of town
population. New Brunswick contains 14 counties; in the decade 1871-81
only one of these showed a slight diminution, but not less than 7 in
the decade 1881-91. The 18 counties of Nova Scotia all showed an
increase in 1871-81, 8 showed a decrease in 1881-91. Quebec contains
61 counties, 10 of which showed a decrease in 1871-81, 26 in 1881-91.
Ontario has 48 counties, only 4 of which showed slight decrease in
1871-81; 20 showed a much more rapid decrease in 1881-91.
The following table shows that the accelerating decrease of the rural
parts is accompanied by a correspondingly accelerating increase of the
chief towns:--
----------------+----------+----------+----------
| 1871. | 1881. | 1891.
----------------+----------+----------+----------
Kingston[274] | 12,407 | 14,091 | 19,264
London | 15,826 | 26,266 | 31,977
Ottawa | 21,545 | 31,307 | 44,154
Hamilton | 26,717 | 35,961 | 48,980
Toronto | 56,092 | 96,196 | 181,220
----------------+----------+----------+----------
| 132,586 | 203,821 | 325,595
----------------+----------+----------+----------
The portentously rapid growth of the largest cities is of course not
wholly attributable to economic causes. To form the capital cities of
the New World, political and social influences have co-operated with
industrial. Nor can these causes be ignored in explaining the rapid
growth of certain European capitals, especially Berlin, Paris,
London, and Vienna. But the effective operation of these forces is
largely dependent on the modern machinery of transport, and in the
main these great centres must be regarded as manufacturing and
commercial towns.
Though the lack of any common statistical basis prevents us from being
able to trace with exactitude the comparative pace of this movement in
different countries, we know enough to justify the general conclusion
that this centralising tendency varies directly with the degree of
material civilisation attained in the several countries by the mass of
the population. In England, France, United States, Australia, where
steam engines, electric light, newspapers, and all the most highly
elaborated mechanical contrivances are available in towns, the growth
of town life is most rapid; in Russia, Turkey, India, Egypt, where
mechanical development is still far behind, the townward march is far
slower. As the area of machine-industry spreads, so this movement of
population will become more general, and as towns grow larger so it
would appear that this power to suck in the rural population is
stronger and more extensive.
Sec. 3. These facts and figures do not, however, of themselves justify
the conclusion that a larger proportion of the world's population is
moving into towns. In all the advanced industrial countries a smaller
proportion of the population is engaged in those extractive and
domestic industries which belong to rural life, a larger proportion in
the manufacturing and distributive industries which belong to towns.
But this movement is made possible by the fact that an increasing
proportion of the food and the raw materials of manufacture used in
these countries is drawn from the labour of the more backward
countries. The increase of the area of the industrial world is
effecting such a division of labour as hands over an ever-increasing
proportion of the agricultural work to the inhabitants of those
countries which do not rank as civilised industrial countries. The
known growth of certain large trading centres in India, China, Egypt,
South Africa, etc., does not justify us, in the absence of careful
statistical inquiry, in assuming that an increased proportion of the
inhabitants of these and other more backward portions of the globe is
passing into town life. Unless agricultural machinery and improved
agricultural methods are advancing more rapidly in these great
"growing areas" than we have a right to suppose, it would seem that
there must be some increased demand for agricultural and other rural
labour which shall, partially, at any rate, compensate for the
diminished demand for such kinds of labour in the more advanced
industrial communities. For although a large number of the industries
subsidiary to agriculture, the making of tools, waggons, gates,
fencing, etc., have now passed from the country to the towns, while
the economies of machinery and improved cultivation have advanced so
far that it is alleged that three men working on soil of average
quality can raise food for one thousand, still the growth of
population with a constantly rising standard of material consumption
seems likely to prevent any net diminution in the proportion of labour
engaged upon the soil in the industrial world. So long as modern
methods of production and consumption in civilised countries require
an ever-increasing quantity of raw materials, it would seem _a priori_
unlikely that a smaller proportion of the whole industry of the world
should be devoted to agricultural and other extractive industries, and
a larger amount to the manufacturing and distributive industries,
where the chief economies of machine-production are so largely
applied.
Since this growth of town population is quicker in the advanced
industrial communities, slower in the less advanced, so it may well be
the case that, in the countries which are but slightly and indirectly
affected by modern industry, it does not exist at all. There exist,
however, no satisfactory data upon which a judgment may be formed upon
this point.
Sec. 4. The effects of this concentration of population upon the
character and life of the people are multifarious. For convenience in
grouping facts, these effects may be considered in relation to (_A_)
physical health, (_B_) intelligence, (_C_) morals, though it will be
evident that the influences placed under these respective heads act
and react upon one another in many intricate and important ways.
(_A_) The best test of the effect of town life upon the population is
afforded by a comparison of the rates of mortality of town and country
population respectively.
DEATH-RATE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY DISTRICTS OF ENGLAND, 1851-90.[275]
--------+------------------------------+-------------------
| Annual Deaths per 1000. | Deaths in Town
+----------+--------+----------+ Districts to
Years. | England | | | 100 Deaths in
| and | Town. | Country. | Country in equal
| Wales. | | | numbers living.
--------+----------+--------+----------+-------------------
1851-60 | 22.2 | 24.7 | 19.9 | 124
1861-70 | 22.5 | 24.8 | 19.7 | 126
1871-80 | 21.4 | 23.1 | 19.0 | 122
1881 | 18.9 | 20.1 | 16.9 | 119
1882 | 19.6 | 20.9 | 17.3 | 121
1883 | 19.5 | 20.5 | 17.9 | 115
1884 | 19.5 | 20.6 | 17.7 | 117
1885 | 19.0 | 19.7 | 17.8 | 111
1886 | 19.3 | 20.0 | 18.0 | 111
1887 | 18.8 | 19.7 | 17.2 | 115
1888 | 17.8 | 20.9 | 17.4 | 114
1889 | 17.9 | 19.3 | 16.4 | 118
1890 | | 20.9 | 17.4 | 120
--------+----------+--------+----------+-------------------
But as matters stand at present the statistics above quoted do not
mark the full extent of the difference of healthfulness in town and
country. When allowance is made for age and sex distribution in town
and country population, the difference in death-rate appears much
greater. For in the towns are found (_a_) a much larger proportion of
females; (_b_) a larger proportion of adults of both sexes in the
prime of life; (_c_) a much smaller proportion of very aged
persons:[276] hence if conditions of health were equal in town and
country, the town death-rate would be lower instead of higher than
that of the country. The _Report of the Census of 1881_[277] calls
special attention to this point, which is commonly ignored in
comparing death-rates of town and country. "If we take the mean
(1871-80) death-rates in England and Wales at each age-period as a
standard, the death-rate in an urban population would be 20.40 per
1000, while the death-rate in the rural population would be 22.83.
Such would be their respective death-rates on the hypothesis that the
urban districts and the rural districts were equally healthy. We know,
however as a matter of fact that urban death-rates, instead of being
lower than rural death-rates, are much higher. The difference of
healthiness, therefore, between the two is much greater than the
difference between their death-rates."
The same facts come out in comparing Paris with the rest of France. At
each age the death-rate for Paris is higher than for France.
Age.[278] Paris. France.
1886. 1877-80.
0 to 1 year 230? 170?
1 to 5 years 58.2 28
15 to 20 " 9.1 6
30 to 40 " 13.6 10
60 to 70 " 51.2 41
The English statistics indicate a slight and by no means constant
tendency towards a diminution of the difference between town and rural
mortality, due no doubt to improvements in city sanitation and to some
general elevation of the physical environment and standard of living
among a large section of the working classes. The same slight tendency
is visible in France. During the period 1861-65 the urban death-rate
was 26.1, as compared with 21.5, the rural death-rate; during the
period 1878-82 the rates were respectively 24.3 and 20.9.[279]
Such indications of hygienic progress in our towns are not, however,
sufficient to justify any expectation that the life of industrial
towns will be made as healthy as that of the country. It is not
possible to ignore the fatal significance of the continuous flow of an
increasing proportion of the younger, healthier, and more vigorous
part of the country population into town life. Dr. Ogle, who has
collected much evidence upon this subject, sums up as follows:--"The
combined effect of this constantly higher mortality of the towns, and
of the constant immigration into it of the pick of the rural
population, must clearly be a gradual deterioration of the whole,
inasmuch as the more energetic and vigorous members of the community
are consumed more rapidly than the rest of the population. The system
is one which leads to the survival of the unfittest."
Sec. 5. Not only is life on an average of shorter duration in the towns,
but it is of inferior physical quality while it lasts. The lowering of
the townsman's physique not merely renders him less able to resist
definite assaults of disease but injures his general capacity of work
and enjoyment. This progressive deterioration of physique accounts for
the unceasing flow of fresh country blood into the towns. In spite of
the advantage of possession and knowledge of the town, the townsman
cannot hold his own in the competition for town work; the new-comer
jostles the old-comer from the best posts, and drives him to depend
upon inferior and more precarious occupations for a living. Economic
conditions, acquired social tastes, and impaired powers of physical
labour prevent the feeble town blood from flowing back into the
country to recruit its vigour. Hence the _impasse_ which forces
problems of town poverty and incapacity ever more prominently upon the
social reformer.
In dealing with the diseases of occupations, Dr. Arlidge says, "It is
a most difficult problem to solve, especially in the case of an
industrial town population, how far the diseases met with in it are
town-made and how far trade-made; the former almost always
predominate."[280]
It is not indeed possible to clearly distinguish the two classes of
effects. Since machinery makes the industrial town, it makes it as a
place to work in and a place to live in, and though certain trade
conditions will operate more directly upon the inhabitants as workers,
their effects will merge with and react upon the life-conditions of
the town. The special characteristics of town work which cause
ill-health and disease are--
(_a_) The predominance of indoor occupations, involving
unwholesome air.
(_b_) The sedentary character of most work in factories or
workrooms, or otherwise the lack of free play of physical
activities.
(_c_) The wear and tear of nerve fibre (_e.g._, in
boiler-making, weaving sheds, etc.).
(_d_) The wearisome monotony and lack of interest attending
highly specialised and sub-divided machine-industry, producing
physical lassitude.[281]
(_e_) Injuries arising from dust fumes, or other deleterious
matter, or from the handling of dangerous material or tools.
Much valuable work has been done of recent years by French, German,
and English physicians and statisticians, throwing light upon the
specific diseases appertaining to various industries, and giving some
measurement of their extent. But though certain specifically
industrial qualities have a considerable place in swelling the
mortality of towns, Dr. Arlidge is fully justified in his opinion that
in industrial centres more of the diseases are town-made than
trade-made. The statistics of infant mortality are conclusive upon
this point. In comparing the death-rates for town and country, the
difference is far wider for children below the industrial age than for
adults engaged in industrial work. Mr. Galton has calculated that in a
typical industrial town the number of children of artisan townsfolk
that grow up are little more than half as many as in the case of the
children of labouring people in a healthy country district.[282] The
figures quoted above from M. Levasseur relating to France point to a
similar conclusion. Many of the evils commonly classified as belonging
to specific industries, in particular the foul atmosphere, imperfect
sanitation, and overcrowding, which are found in many factories and
most city workshops, are rightly regarded as town-made rather than
trade-made, for they are the normal and often the necessary
accompaniments of a congested industrial population. In qualification
of this, having regard to the effects of machine-development, we must
remember that the worst hygienic conditions of town work are found in
those branches of industry which have lagged behind in industrial
evolution, while the best hygienic conditions are found in the most
highly-organised branches of textile industry. "Generally speaking,
the more elaborate and costly the machinery, the more excellent the
architecture. Thus in textile works machinery acquires its maximum of
importance, and by its dimensions necessitates commodious shops,
buildings of great size, and well-ordered arrangements to facilitate
the performance of the mutually dependent series of operations carried
on."[283]
Legal restrictions upon unhealthy and dangerous employments, shorter
working hours, adequate inspection, the stimulus given by such
measures to a more rapid application of highly-developed machinery,
may succeed in reducing considerably the physical evils directly
arising from town industries. But the town will still remain a more
unhealthy place to live in than the country, and as on the one hand
the fundamental and paramount importance of a healthy physical
environment receives fuller recognition, and on the other hand larger
leisure and opportunities of enjoyment and development make life more
valuable to the mass of the workers than it is at present, the
pressure of this problem of town life will grow apace.
Sec. 6. (_B_) That town life, as distinguished from town work, is
educative of certain intellectual and moral qualities, is evident.
Setting aside that picked intelligence which flows to the town to
compete successfully for intellectual employment, there can be no
question but that the townsman has a larger superficial knowledge of
the world and human nature. He is shrewd, alert, versatile, quicker,
and more resourceful than the countryman. In thought, speech, action,
this superiority shows itself. The townsman has a more developed
consciousness, his intelligence is constantly stimulated in a thousand
ways by larger and more varied society, and by a more diversified and
complex economic environment. While there is reason to believe that
town work is on the average less educative than country work, town
life more than turns the scale. The social intercourse of the club,
the trade society, the church, the home, the public-house, the
music-hall, the street, supply innumerable educative influences, to
say nothing of the ampler opportunities of consciously organised
intellectual education which are available in large towns. If,
however, we examine a little deeper the character of town education
and intelligence certain tolerably definite limitations show
themselves. School instruction, slightly more advanced than in the
country, is commonly utilised to sharpen industrial competition, and
to feed that sensational interest in sport and crime which absorbs the
attention of the masses in their non-working hours; it seldom forms
the foundation of an intellectual life in which knowledge and taste
are reckoned in themselves desirable. The power to read and write is
employed by the great majority of all classes in ways which evoke a
minimum of thought and wholesome feeling. Social, political, and
religious prejudices are made to do the work which should be done by
careful thought and scientific investigation.
Scattered and unrelated fragments of half-baked information form a
stock of "knowledge" with which the townsman's glib tongue enables him
to present a showy intellectual shop-front. Business smartness pays
better in the town, and the low intellectual qualities which are
contained in it are educated by town life. The knowledge of human
nature thus evoked is in no sense science, it is a mere rule-of-thumb
affair, a thin mechanical empiricism. The capable business man who is
said to understand the "world" and his fellow-men, has commonly no
knowledge of human nature in the larger sense, but merely knows from
observation how the average man of a certain limited class is likely
to act within a narrow prescribed sphere of self-seeking. Town life,
then, strongly favours the education of certain shallow forms of
intelligence. In actual attainment the townsman is somewhat more
advanced than the countryman. But the deterioration of physique which
accompanies this gain causes a weakening of mental fibre: the
potentiality of intellectual development and work which the countryman
brings with him on his entry to town life is thwarted and depressed by
the progressive physical enfeeblement. Most of the best and strongest
intellectual work done in the towns is done by immigrants, not by
town-bred folk.
Sec. 7. (_C_) This intellectual weakness of town life is best expressed
in terms which show the intimate relation between intelligence and
morals. A lack of "grit," pertinacity of purpose, endurance,
"character," marks the townsman of the second generation as compared
with the countryman. As the intellectual powers of the townsman,
though quantitatively impaired, are more highly developed than those
of the countryman, so it is with his "morals." In positive
attainments of conscience, virtue, and vice, the townsman shows
considerable advance. This point is commonly misunderstood. The annals
of crime afford irrefutable evidence of the greater criminality of the
towns. London, containing less than one-fifth of the population of
England and Wales, is responsible for more than one-third of the
annual number of indictable crimes.[284] In France the criminality of
the urban population is just double that of the rural population.[285]
In 1884-86, out of each 100,000 city population sixteen were charged
with crimes; out of each 100,000 rural population only eight. It is
indeed commonly recognised in criminology that, other things being
equal, crime varies with the density of population. There is no
difficulty in understanding why this should be so. The pressure of
population and the concentration of property afford to the
evil-disposed individual an increased number of temptations to invade
the person or property of others; for many sorts of crime the
conditions of town life afford greater security to the criminal;
social and industrial causes create a large degenerate class not
easily amenable to social control, incapable of getting regular work
to do, or of doing it if they could get it.
If the town were a social organism formed by men desirous of living
together for mutual support, comfort, and enjoyment in their lives, it
might reasonably be expected that a wholesome public feeling would be
so strongly operative as to outweigh the increased opportunities of
crime. But, as we have seen, the modern town is a result of the desire
to produce and distribute most economically the largest aggregate of
material goods: economy of work, not convenience of life, is the
object. Now, the economy of factory co-operation is only social to a
very limited extent; anti-social feelings are touched and stimulated
at every point by the competition of workers with one another, the
antagonism between employers and employed, between sellers and buyers,
factory and factory, shop and shop.
Perhaps the most potent influence in breaking the strength of the
_morale_ of the town worker is the precarious and disorderly
character of town work. That element of monotonous order, which we
found excessive in the education afforded by the individual machine to
the machine-tender, is balanced by a corresponding defect in
machine-industry taken as a whole. Town work, as we have seen, is more
irregular than country work, and this irregularity has a most
pernicious effect upon the character of the worker. Professor Foxwell
has thus strikingly expressed the moral influences of this economic
factor: "When employment is precarious, thrift and self-reliance are
discouraged. The savings of years may be swallowed up in a few months.
A fatalistic spirit is developed. Where all is uncertain and there is
not much to lose, reckless overpopulation is certain to be set at.
These effects are not confined to the poorer classes. The business
world is equally demoralised by industrial speculation, careful
prevision cannot reckon upon receiving its due return, and speculation
of the purest gambling type is thereby encouraged. But the working
class suffers most."[286]
The town as an industrial structure is at present inadequate to supply
a social education which shall be strong enough to defeat the
tendencies to anti-social conduct which are liable to take shape in
criminal action. The intellectual training given by town life does
not, as we have seen, assist in stimulating higher intellectual and
moral interests whose satisfaction lies above the plane of material
desire. There is indeed some evidence that the meagre and wholly
rudimentary education given to our town-dwellers is, by reason of its
inadequacy, a direct feeder of town vices. The lower forms of
music-hall entertainment, the dominant popular vice of gambling, the
more degraded kinds of printed matter, owe their existence and their
financial success to a public policy which has confined the education
of the people to the three R's, making it generally impossible, always
difficult, for them to obtain such intellectual training as shall
implant higher intellectual interests with whose pursuit they may
occupy their leisure. But, in taking count of the criminality and vice
of large towns it is not just to ignore a certain counter-claim which
might be made. If our annals of virtue were kept as carefully as our
annals of vice, we might find that town life stood higher in the one
than in the other. There are more opportunities to display positive
goodness and positive badness in the town; life is more crowded and
more rapid, and it is likely that acts of kindness, generosity,
self-denial, even of heroic self-sacrifice, are more numerous in the
town than in the country. The average townsman is more developed
morally as well as intellectually for good and for evil. That the good
does not more signally predominate is in no small measure due to the
feeble social environment. Public opinion is generally a little in
advance of the average morality of the individuals who compose the
public. Here is a mighty lever for raising the masses. But where the
density of population is determined by industrial competition, rather
than by human-social causes, it would seem that the force of sound
public opinion is in inverse proportion to the density of population,
being weakest in the most crowded cities. In spite of the machinery of
political, religious, social, trade organisations in large towns, it
is probable that the true spiritual cohesiveness between individual
members is feebler than in any other form of society. If it is true
that as the larger village grows into the town, and the town into the
ever larger city, there is a progressive weakening of the bonds of
moral cohesion between individuals, that the larger the town the
feebler the spiritual unity, we are face to face with the heaviest
indictment that can be brought against modern industrial progress, and
the forces driving an increased proportion of our population into
towns are bringing about a decadence of _morale_ which is the
necessary counterpart of the deterioration of national physique.
So far as we are justified in regarding the modern town and the
tendency to increased town life as results of machinery and industrial
evolution, there can be little doubt of the validity of these
accusations. The free play of economic forces under the guidance of
the selfish instincts of commercial individuals, or groups of
individuals, is driving an increased proportion of the population of
civilised countries into a town life which is injurious to physical
and moral health, and provides no security for the attainment of an
intellectual life which is worth living.
Sec. 8. But powerful as these centralising forces have been during the
last century and a half, we are not justified in assuming that they
will continue to operate with gathering momentum in the future, and
that the results which are assigned to them will increase in
magnitude. Such an assumption would ignore two groups of counteracting
forces which are beginning to manifest themselves in the more advanced
industrial communities.
The first of these groups consists of a number of directly
counteracting or decentralising forces.
As a town grows in size the value of the ground on which it stands
grows so rapidly that it becomes economically available only for
certain classes of industrial undertaking, in which the occupation of
central space is an element of prime importance. In all large
commercial cities the residential quarters are driven gradually
farther and farther away from the centre by incessant encroachments of
business premises. The city of London and the "down town" quarter of
New York are conspicuous examples of this displacement of residential
buildings by commercial. The richer inhabitants are the earliest and
quickest to leave. As the factory or the shop plants itself firmly
among the better-class dwelling-houses, these inhabitants pass in
large numbers to the outskirts of the town, forming residential
suburbs which, for some time at any rate, are free from the specific
evils of congestion. This encroachment of the factory and the shop at
first has little effect, if any, in thinning the residential
population of the district. While the shopkeepers and their employees
live in the neighbourhood, and the factory workers can afford to pay
the rent for houses or lodgings near their work, the central
population will grow denser than before. But as the city grows in size
and commercial importance, an increasing number of the most central
sites will pass from manufactory premises and shops into use for
warehouses and business offices, and for other work in connection with
distribution and finance. The workers on these premises will, in the
case of the wealthier, be unwilling, in the case of the poorer be
unable, to live near their work; where factories and shops remain, the
great mass of the employees will not be able to afford house-rents
determined by this competition of a more valuable commercial use of
land. So we find that the number of inhabitants of the city of London
diminishes in each recent census, and the same is true as regards the
most valuable portions of Paris, New York, and other large cities.
This decentralising force is, however, only in full operation in the
very centre of the largest cities. The first effect of the competition
of commercial with living premises is to raise house-rents and to
drive the poorer population into narrower, less commodious, and less
sanitary dwellings. Where ground landowner and builder have a free
hand the market value of central ground for small, lofty, cheap-built
slums can be made to hold its own for a long time with the business
premises which surround them. Even when ground value has risen so high
as to displace many of these slums, the tendency is for the latter to
spring up and thicken in districts not far removed from the centre.
Thus in London the densest population is found in Whitechapel and St.
George's in the East. Indeed, there is evidence that these districts
have already reached "saturation point," that is to say, the pressure
of business demands for ground, the increased competition of the
dwellers themselves, and the growing restrictions imposed by law and
public opinion upon the construction of the most "paying" forms of
house property, prevent any further growth of population in these
parts. As this saturation point is reached in one district, the growth
of dense population goes on faster in the outlying districts, and,
with forms which vary with local conditions, the same economic forces
manifest themselves with similar results over a wider area. The poorer
population shifts as short a distance as it can, and then only when
driven by a rise of rents. Even when it moves somewhat farther out it
seldom gets far enough to escape the centralising forces. Residential
working-class districts like West Ham become rapidly congested by the
constant flow of population from more central places. Moreover, the
same decentralising forces are set up in the large suburban districts,
by the planting there of factories and other industrial works designed
to take advantage of a large supply of labour close at hand, and land
procurable at a lower rental. This applies also to many of the suburbs
originally chosen as residential quarters of the well-to-do classes.
The whole western district of London, comprised by Kensington, Notting
Hill, Hammersmith, etc., contains large and designed areas of dense
poverty and overcrowding. So far as the mass of poorer workers in
London and other large cities are concerned, it would appear that
their endeavour to escape beyond the limits of congested city life has
hitherto been unavailing: the decentralising forces of rising ground
rents, uncomfortable and insanitary dwellings, are ever at work, but
the centralising forces set up by any large number who seek an outlet
in the same direction, with close spacial limitations to their
migrating tendency, are too strong. High rents, a fuller appreciation
of the hygienic advantages of more space, and of proximity to country
air and country scenes, have induced an increasing number of the
"middle" classes, and even of those who, in a pecuniary sense, form
the upper working class, to incur the expenditure of time, trouble,
and railway fares involved in living sufficiently far from the centre
to avoid the centralising pressure. The most important practical
problem of social reform to-day is how to secure this option of
extra-city life for the mass of city workers. If the economies of low
ground rent and slightly cheaper labour were sufficiently large to
induce the establishment of manufactories at considerable distances
from large centres of population, we might look in time to see the
large industrial town give place to a number of industrial villages,
gathered round some single large factory or "works." The growing
facilities of communication with large towns at increased distances,
afforded by recent expansions of railway service, and by improvements
in telegraphic and telephonic media, have done something towards this
form of decentralisation. Round Manchester and other larger northern
manufacturing towns an increasing number of factories are springing
up; in the United States the same phenomenon is still commoner.
Smaller rents, cheaper living, lower wages, especially in textile
mills where women are largely employed, and lastly, more submissive
labour, are everywhere the economic stimuli of this decentralisation
of manufacture. Assuming that some more cheaply and easily
transmissible motor-power can be found for manufacture, and that a
cheap and readily available transport service by steam or electricity
is widely spread, it seems not unlikely that the economies of
decentralised manufacture may widely or even universally outweigh the
primary centralising economies which created our great manufacturing
towns. Whether a wide diffusion of industrial villages, which might be
of a size and structure to reproduce in a somewhat less virulent form
many of the physical and moral vices of the larger towns, and which
possibly might retard or nullify some of the educative and elevating
influences springing from the organisation and co-operative action of
large masses of workers, can be regarded as a desirable substitute or
remedy for our congested city life, is open to grave doubt. A whole
country like England, thickly blotched at even intervals by big
industrial villages comprised of a huge factory or two with a few
rectangular streets of small, dull, grimy, red-brick cottages, and one
or two mansions standing inside their parks at the side remote from
the factories, would, from an aesthetic point of view, be repulsive to
the last degree; and out of a country, the whole of which was thus
ordered for pure purposes of industrial economy, it is difficult to
believe that any of the higher products of human effort could proceed.
But the possibility of some such outcome of the decentralising forces
already visible must not be ignored. It is even likely that the labour
movement, advancing as it does more rapidly in large manufacturing
centres than elsewhere, may, by increasing the freedom and power of
labour associated upon a large scale, apply an additional stimulus to
the _entrepreneur_ to place his business undertakings so as to make
strongly combined action of labourers more difficult. American
manufacturers are distinctly actuated by this motive in selecting the
locality of their factories, and have been able in many cases to
maintain a despotic control over the workers which would be quite
impossible were their factories planted in the middle of a large
city.[287]
Sec. 9. This method of partial decentralisation depends in large measure,
it is evident, upon such progress in the transport services for
persons, goods, and intelligence as shall minimise the inconvenience
of a less central position, rendering the location of the business a
matter of comparative indifference. But it is to improved transport
services that we may look to facilitate a kind of decentralisation,
the net gain of which is less dubious than that arising from the
substitution of a large number of industrial villages for a small
number of industrial towns. Is it not possible for more town-workers
to combine centralised work with decentralised life--to work in the
town but to live in the country? May not this advantage, at present
confined to the wealthier classes, be brought within the reach of the
poorer classes? Some small progress has been made of recent years
towards the realisation of this ideal. Three chief difficulties stand
in the way of success: the length of the working-day, which makes the
time required for travelling to and from a distant home a matter of
serious consideration; the defective supply of convenient, cheap, and
frequent trains or other quick means of conveyance; the irregularity
and uncertainty of tenure in most classes of labour, which prevents
the establishment of a settled house chosen with regard to convenient
access to a single point of industry. Some recent progress has been
made in large cities, such as Vienna, Paris, and London, in providing
workmen's trains and by the cheapening of train and 'bus fares; but
such experiments are generally confined within too narrow an area to
achieve any satisfactory amount of decentralisation, for the interests
of private carrying companies demand that the largest number of
passengers shall travel from the smallest number of stations. It would
appear that considerable extension of direct public control over the
means of transport will be required, in order to secure to the people
the full assistance of modern mechanical appliances in enabling them
to avoid the mischief of over-crowded dwellings. For such purposes the
railway has now replaced the high-road, and we can no more afford to
entrust the public interest in the one case to the calculating
self-interest of private speculation than in the other case. A firm
public control in the common interest over the steam and electric
railways of the future seems essential to the attainment of adequate
decentralisation for dwelling purposes. Private enterprise in
transport, working hand in hand with private ownership of land, will
only substitute for a single mass of over-crowded dwellings a number
of smaller suburban areas of over-crowded dwellings. The bicycle
alone, among modern appliances of mechanical speed, can safely be
entrusted to the free private control of individuals, and, if one may
judge by the remarkable expansion of its use, it seems likely to
afford no trifling assistance to the decentralising tendencies.
Sec. 10. The removal of the other two barriers belongs to that joint
action of labour organisation and legislation which aims at building
up a condition of stable industrial economy. One of the most
serviceable results of that shortening of the working-day, upon which
public attention is so powerfully concentrated, would be the
assistance it would render to enable workmen and workwomen to live at
a longer distance from their work. So long, however, as a large
proportion of city workers have no security of tenure in their work,
are liable at a day's or a week's notice, for no fault of their own,
to be obliged to seek work under another employer in a distant
locality, or if employed by the same master to be sent to a distant
job, now to find themselves without any work at all, at another time
to have to work all hours to make up a subsistence wage, it is evident
that these schemes of decentralisation can be but partial in their
application. An increased stability both in the several trades and in
the individual businesses within the trade is a first requisite to the
establishment of a fixed healthy home for the industrial worker and
his family.
Sec. 11. It is, however, unlikely that any wide or lasting solution of
the problem of congested town life will be found in a sharp local
severance of the life of an industrial society which shall abandon the
town to the purposes of a huge workshop, reserving the country for
habitation. The true unity of individual and social life forbids this
abrupt cleavage between the arts of production and consumption,
between the man and his work. It is only in the case of the largest
and densest industrial cities, swollen to an unwieldy and dangerous
size, that such methods of decentralisation can in some measure be
applied. In these monstrous growths machinery of decentralisation may
be evoked to undo in part at any rate the work of centralising
machinery. In smaller towns, where the circumference bears a larger
proportion to the mass, a spreading of the close-packed population
over an expanded town-area will be more feasible, and will form the
first step in that series of reforms which shall humanise the
industrial town. The congestion of the poorer population of our towns,
and the struggle for fresh air and elbow-room which it implies, is
the most formidable barrier to the work of transforming the town from
a big workshop into a human dwelling-place, with an individual life, a
character, a soul of its own. The true reform policy is not to destroy
the industrial town but to breathe into it the breath of social life,
to temper and subordinate its industrial machine-goods-producing
character to the higher and more complex purposes of social life. An
ample, far-sighted, enlightened, social control over the whole area of
city ground, whether used for dwellings or for industrial purposes, is
the first condition of the true municipal life. The industrial town,
left for its growth to individual industrial control, compresses into
unhealthily close proximity large numbers of persons drawn together
from different quarters of the earth, with different and often
antagonistic aims, with little knowledge of one another, with no
important common end to form a bond of social sympathy. The town
presents the single raw material of local proximity out of which
municipal life is to be built. The first business of the municipal
reformer then is to transform this excessive proximity into wholesome
neighbourhood, in order that true neighbourly feelings may have room
to grow and thrive, and eventually to ripen into the flower of a fair
civic life. "A modern city," it has been well said, "is probably the
most impersonal combination of individuals that has ever been formed
in the world's history."[288] To evoke the personal human qualities of
this medley of city workers so as to reach within the individual the
citizen, to educate the civic feeling until it take shape in civic
activities and institutions, which shall not only safeguard the public
welfare against the encroachments of private industrial greed, but
shall find an ever ampler and nobler expression in the aesthetic beauty
and spiritual dignity of a complex, common life--all this work of
transformation lies in front of the democracy, grouped in its
ever-increasing number of town-units.
FOOTNOTES:
[267] According to Arthur Young, in 1770 half the population was
already urban. But though the townward drift, owing in large measure
to the land-hunger of the aristocracy and wealthy merchant class, and
the labour-saving economy of large farming, was clearly visible before
the development of machine-industry, it is probable that Young's
estimate goes beyond the facts.
[268] Mr. Cannan points out that this is due on the one hand to the
healthier conditions of the towns whose natural increase is larger; on
the other hand, to an increased migration from the rural parts to
foreign countries. ("The Decline of Urban Immigration," _National
Review_, January 1894.)
[269] Ravenstein, _Statistical Journal_, June 1889.
[270] _Preliminary Report_ (c. 6422), p. 23.
[271] It is often pointed out that an Urban Sanitary District is not
always a town. But if rural areas are sometimes classed as towns, many
large outskirts of towns, practically partaking of the character of
the towns, are not included. The figures cited above may therefore be
regarded as a fairly accurate account of the growth of town life.
[272] Longstaff, "Rural Depopulation," _Journal of Stat. Soc._, Sept.
1893.
[273] Cf. Longstaff, _Studies in Statistics_, p. 157.
[274] These Canadian statistics are quoted from Dr. Longstaff's paper
in _Journal of Statistical Society_, Sept. 1893.
[275] _Report of Commissioners, etc._, vol. XXX. p. 65.
[276] Newsholm, _Vital Statistics_, p. 137. (Sonnenschein.)
[277] Vol. iv. p. 23.
[278] Levasseur, vol. ii. p. 402.
[279] _Ibid._, vol. ii. p. 155.
[280] _Diseases of Occupations_, p. 33.
[281] Dr. Arlidge, pp. 25, 26.
[282] Quoted by Professor Marshall, _Principles of Political Economy_,
p. 258. Cf. also _Statistical Society_, March 1873, for U.S.A.
statistics.
[283] Dr. Arlidge, p. 30.
[284] W.D. Morrison, "The Study of Crime," _Mind_, vol. i. N.S., No.
4.
[285] Levasseur, vol. ii. p. 456.
[286] _Claims of Labour_, p. 196.
[287] One of the specific advantages in America has been the absence
of any serious endeavour on the part of legislation to put down Truck.
The grossest abuses of Truck appear in country manufacturing towns of
the United States.
[288] J.S. Mackenzie, _An Introduction to Social Philosophy_, p. 101.