Now, the velocity at which a man and his belongings may pass about the
earth is in itself a very trivial matter indeed, but it involves certain
other matters not at all trivial, standing, indeed, in an almost
fundamental relation to human society. It will be the business of this
chapter to discuss the relation between the social order and the
available means of transit, and to attempt to deduce from the principles
elucidated the coming phases in that extraordinary expansion, shifting
and internal redistribution of population that has been so conspicuous
during the last hundred years.
Let us consider the broad features of the redistribution of the
population that has characterized the nineteenth century. It may be
summarized as an unusual growth of great cities and a slight tendency to
depopulation in the country. The growth of the great cities is the
essential phenomenon. These aggregates having populations of from eight
hundred thousand upward to four and five millions, are certainly, so far
as the world outside the limits of the Chinese empire goes, entirely an
unprecedented thing. Never before, outside the valleys of the three
great Chinese rivers, has any city--with the exception of Rome and
perhaps (but very doubtfully) of Babylon--certainly had more than a
million inhabitants, and it is at least permissible to doubt whether the
population of Rome, in spite of its exacting a tribute of sea-borne food
from the whole of the Mediterranean basin, exceeded a million for any
great length of time.[13] But there are now ten town aggregates having a
population of over a million, nearly twenty that bid fair to reach that
limit in the next decade, and a great number at or approaching a
quarter of a million. We call these towns and cities, but, indeed, they
are of a different order of things to the towns and cities of the
eighteenth-century world.
Concurrently with the aggregation of people about this new sort of
centre, there has been, it is alleged, a depletion of the country
villages and small townships. But, so far as the counting of heads goes,
this depletion is not nearly so marked as the growth of the great towns.
Relatively, however, it is striking enough.
Now, is this growth of large towns really, as one may allege, a result
of the development of railways in the world, or is it simply a change in
human circumstances that happens to have arisen at the same time? It
needs only a very general review of the conditions of the distribution
of population to realize that the former is probably the true answer.
It will be convenient to make the issue part of a more general
proposition, namely, that _the general distribution of population in a
country must always be directly dependent on transport facilities_. To
illustrate this point roughly we may build up an imaginary simple
community by considering its needs. Over an arable country-side, for
example, inhabited by a people who had attained to a level of
agricultural civilization in which war was no longer constantly
imminent, the population would be diffused primarily by families and
groups in farmsteads. It might, if it were a very simple population, be
almost all so distributed. But even the simplest agriculturists find a
certain convenience in trade. Certain definite points would be
convenient for such local trade and intercourse as the people found
desirable, and here it is that there would arise the germ of a town. At
first it might be no more than an appointed meeting place, a market
square, but an inn and a blacksmith would inevitably follow, an altar,
perhaps, and, if these people had writing, even some sort of school. It
would have to be where water was found, and it would have to be
generally convenient of access to its attendant farmers.
Now, if this meeting place was more than a certain distance from any
particular farm, it would be inconvenient for that farmer to get himself
and his produce there and back, and to do his business in a comfortable
daylight. He would not be able to come and, instead, he would either
have to go to some other nearer centre to trade and gossip with his
neighbours or, failing this, not go at all. Evidently, then, there would
be a maximum distance between such places. This distance in England,
where traffic has been mainly horse traffic for many centuries, seems to
have worked out, according to the gradients and so forth, at from eight
to fifteen miles, and at such distances do we find the country towns,
while the horseless man, the serf, and the labourer and labouring wench
have marked their narrow limits in the distribution of the intervening
villages. If by chance these gathering places have arisen at points
much closer than this maximum, they have come into competition, and one
has finally got the better of the other, so that in England the
distribution is often singularly uniform. Agricultural districts have
their towns at about eight miles, and where grazing takes the place of
the plough, the town distances increase to fifteen.[14] And so it is,
entirely as a multiple of horse and foot strides, that all the villages
and towns of the world's country-side have been plotted out.[15]
A third, and almost final, factor determining town distribution in a
world without railways, would be the seaport and the navigable river.
Ports would grow into dimensions dependent on the population of the
conveniently accessible coasts (or river-banks), and on the quality and
quantity of their products, and near these ports, as the conveniences of
civilization increased, would appear handicraft towns--the largest
possible towns of a foot-and-horse civilization--with industries of such
a nature as the produce of their coasts required.
It was always in connection with a port or navigable river that the
greater towns of the pre-railway periods arose, a day's journey away
from the coast when sea attack was probable, and shifting to the coast
itself when that ceased to threaten. Such sea-trading handicraft towns
as Bruges, Venice, Corinth, or London were the largest towns of the
vanishing order of things. Very rarely, except in China, did they
clamber above a quarter of a million inhabitants, even though to some of
them there was presently added court and camp. In China, however, a
gigantic river and canal system, laced across plains of extraordinary
fertility, has permitted the growth of several city aggregates with
populations exceeding a million, and in the case of the Hankow trinity
of cities exceeding five million people.
In all these cases the position and the population limit was entirely
determined by the accessibility of the town and the area it could
dominate for the purposes of trade. And not only were the commercial or
natural towns so determined, but the political centres were also finally
chosen for strategic considerations, in a word--communications. And now,
perhaps, the real significance of the previous paper, in which sea
velocities of fifty miles an hour, and land travel at the rate of a
hundred, and even cab and omnibus journeys of thirty or forty miles,
were shown to be possible, becomes more apparent.
At the first sight it might appear as though the result of the new
developments was simply to increase the number of giant cities in the
world by rendering them possible in regions where they had hitherto been
impossible--concentrating the trade of vast areas in a manner that had
hitherto been entirely characteristic of navigable waters. It might seem
as though the state of affairs in China, in which population has been
concentrated about densely-congested "million-cities," with pauper
masses, public charities, and a crowded struggle for existence, for many
hundreds of years, was merely to be extended over the whole world. We
have heard so much of the "problem of our great cities"; we have the
impressive statistics of their growth; the belief in the inevitableness
of yet denser and more multitudinous agglomerations in the future is so
widely diffused, that at first sight it will be thought that no other
motive than a wish to startle can dictate the proposition that not only
will many of these railway-begotten "giant cities" reach their maximum
in the commencing century, but that in all probability they, and not
only they, but their water-born prototypes in the East also, are
destined to such a process of dissection and diffusion as to amount
almost to obliteration, so far, at least, as the blot on the map goes,
within a measurable further space of years.
In advancing this proposition, the present writer is disagreeably aware
that in this matter he has expressed views entirely opposed to those he
now propounds; and in setting forth the following body of
considerations he tells the story of his own disillusionment. At the
outset he took for granted--and, very naturally, he wishes to imagine
that a great number of other people do also take for granted--that the
future of London, for example, is largely to be got as the answer to a
sort of rule-of-three sum. If in one hundred years the population of
London has been multiplied by seven, then in two hundred years--! And
one proceeds to pack the answer in gigantic tenement houses, looming
upon colossal roofed streets, provide it with moving ways (the only
available transit appliances suited to such dense multitudes), and
develop its manners and morals in accordance with the laws that will
always prevail amidst over-crowded humanity so long as humanity endures.
The picture of this swarming concentrated humanity has some effective
possibilities, but, unhappily, if, instead of that obvious rule-of-three
sum, one resorts to an analysis of operating causes, its plausibility
crumbles away, and it gives place to an altogether different forecast--a
forecast, indeed, that is in almost violent contrast to the first
anticipation. It is much more probable that these coming cities will not
be, in the old sense, cities at all; they will present a new and
entirely different phase of human distribution.
The determining factor in the appearance of great cities in the past,
and, indeed, up to the present day, has been the meeting of two or more
transit lines, the confluence of two or more streams of trade, and easy
communication. The final limit to the size and importance of the great
city has been the commercial "sphere of influence" commanded by that
city, the capacity of the alluvial basin of its commerce, so to speak,
the volume of its river of trade. About the meeting point so determined
the population so determined has grouped itself--and this is the point I
overlooked in those previous vaticinations--in accordance with _laws
that are also considerations of transit_.
The economic centre of the city is formed, of course, by the wharves and
landing places--and in the case of railway-fed cities by the
termini--where passengers land and where goods are landed, stored, and
distributed. Both the administrative and business community, traders,
employers, clerks, and so forth, must be within a convenient access of
this centre; and the families, servants, tradesmen, amusement purveyors
dependent on these again must also come within a maximum distance. At a
certain stage in town growth the pressure on the more central area would
become too great for habitual family life there, and an office region
would differentiate from an outer region of homes. Beyond these two
zones, again, those whose connection with the great city was merely
intermittent would constitute a system of suburban houses and areas.
But the grouping of these, also, would be determined finally by the
convenience of access to the dominant centre. That secondary centres,
literary, social, political, or military, may arise about the initial
trade centre, complicates the application but does not alter the
principle here stated. They must all be within striking distance. The
day of twenty-four hours is an inexorable human condition, and up to the
present time all intercourse and business has been broken into spells of
definite duration by intervening nights. Moreover, almost all effective
intercourse has involved personal presence at the point where
intercourse occurs. The possibility, therefore, of going and coming and
doing that day's work has hitherto fixed the extreme limits to which a
city could grow, and has exacted a compactness which has always been
very undesirable and which is now for the first time in the world's
history no longer imperative.
So far as we can judge without a close and uncongenial scrutiny of
statistics, that daily journey, that has governed and still to a very
considerable extent governs the growth of cities, has had, and probably
always will have, a maximum limit of two hours, one hour each way from
sleeping place to council chamber, counter, workroom, or office stool.
And taking this assumption as sound, we can state precisely the maximum
area of various types of town. A pedestrian agglomeration such as we
find in China, and such as most of the European towns probably were
before the nineteenth century, would be swept entirely by a radius of
four miles about the business quarter and industrial centre; and, under
these circumstances, where the area of the feeding regions has been very
large the massing of human beings has probably reached its extreme
limit.[16] Of course, in the case of a navigable river, for example, the
commercial centre might be elongated into a line and the circle of the
city modified into an ellipse with a long diameter considerably
exceeding eight miles, as, for example, in the case of Hankow.
If, now, horseflesh is brought into the problem, an outer radius of six
or eight miles from the centre will define a larger area in which the
carriage folk, the hackney users, the omnibus customers, and their
domestics and domestic camp followers may live and still be members of
the city. Towards that limit London was already probably moving at the
accession of Queen Victoria, and it was clearly the absolute limit of
urban growth--until locomotive mechanisms capable of more than eight
miles an hour could be constructed.
And then there came suddenly the railway and the steamship, the former
opening with extraordinary abruptness a series of vast through-routes
for trade, the latter enormously increasing the security and economy of
the traffic on the old water routes. For a time neither of these
inventions was applied to the needs of intra-urban transit at all. For a
time they were purely centripetal forces. They worked simply to increase
the general volume of trade, to increase, that is, the pressure of
population upon the urban centres. As a consequence the social history
of the middle and later thirds of the nineteenth century, not simply in
England but all over the civilized world, is the history of a gigantic
rush of population into the magic radius of--for most people--four
miles, to suffer there physical and moral disaster less acute but,
finally, far more appalling to the imagination than any famine or
pestilence that ever swept the world. Well has Mr. George Gissing named
nineteenth-century London in one of his great novels the "Whirlpool,"
the very figure for the nineteenth-century Great City, attractive,
tumultuous, and spinning down to death.
But, indeed, these great cities are no permanent maëlstroms. These new
forces, at present still so potently centripetal in their influence,
bring with them, nevertheless, the distinct promise of a centrifugal
application that may be finally equal to the complete reduction of all
our present congestions. The limit of the pre-railway city was the limit
of man and horse. But already that limit has been exceeded, and each day
brings us nearer to the time when it will be thrust outward in every
direction with an effect of enormous relief.
So far the only additions to the foot and horse of the old dispensation
that have actually come into operation, are the suburban railways, which
render possible an average door to office hour's journey of ten or a
dozen miles--further only in the case of some specially favoured
localities. The star-shaped contour of the modern great city, thrusting
out arms along every available railway line, knotted arms of which every
knot marks a station, testify sufficiently to the relief of pressure
thus afforded. Great Towns before this century presented rounded
contours and grew as a puff-ball swells; the modern Great City looks
like something that has burst an intolerable envelope and splashed. But,
as our previous paper has sought to make clear, these suburban railways
are the mere first rough expedient of far more convenient and rapid
developments.
We are--as the Census Returns for 1901 quite clearly show--in the early
phase of a great development of centrifugal possibilities. And since it
has been shown that a city of pedestrians is inexorably limited by a
radius of about four miles, and that a horse-using city may grow out to
seven or eight, it follows that the available area of a city which can
offer a cheap suburban journey of thirty miles an hour is a circle with
a radius of thirty miles. And is it too much, therefore, in view of all
that has been adduced in this and the previous paper, to expect that
the available area for even the common daily toilers of the great city
of the year 2000, or earlier, will have a radius very much larger even
than that? Now, a circle with a radius of thirty miles gives an area of
over 2800 square miles, which is almost a quarter that of Belgium. But
thirty miles is only a very moderate estimate of speed, and the reader
of the former paper will agree, I think, that the available area for the
social equivalent of the favoured season-ticket holders of to-day will
have a radius of over one hundred miles, and be almost equal to the area
of Ireland.[17] The radius that will sweep the area available for such
as now live in the outer suburbs will include a still vaster area.
Indeed, it is not too much to say that the London citizen of the year
2000 A.D. may have a choice of nearly all England and Wales south of
Nottingham and east of Exeter as his suburb, and that the vast stretch
of country from Washington to Albany will be all of it "available" to
the active citizen of New York and Philadelphia before that date.
This does not for a moment imply that cities of the density of our
existing great cities will spread to these limits. Even if we were to
suppose the increase of the populations of the great cities to go on at
its present rate, this enormous extension of available area would still
mean a great possibility of diffusion. But though most great cities are
probably still very far from their maxima, though the network of feeding
railways has still to spread over Africa and China, and though huge
areas are still imperfectly productive for want of a cultivating
population, yet it is well to remember that for each great city, quite
irrespective of its available spaces, a maximum of population is fixed.
Each great city is sustained finally by the trade and production of a
certain proportion of the world's surface--by the area it commands
commercially. The great city cannot grow, except as a result of some
quite morbid and transitory process--to be cured at last by famine and
disorder--beyond the limit the commercial capacity of that commanded
area prescribes. Long before the population of this city, with its inner
circle a third of the area of Belgium, rose towards the old-fashioned
city density, this restriction would come in. Even if we allowed for
considerable increase in the production of food stuffs in the future, it
still remains inevitable that the increase of each city in the world
must come at last upon arrest.
Yet, though one may find reasons for anticipating that this city will in
the end overtake and surpass that one and such-like relative
prophesying, it is difficult to find any data from which to infer the
absolute numerical limits of these various diffused cities. Or perhaps
it is more seemly to admit that no such data have occurred to the
writer. So far as London, St. Petersburg, and Berlin go, it seems fairly
safe to assume that they will go well over twenty millions; and that New
York, Philadelphia, and Chicago will probably, and Hankow almost
certainly, reach forty millions. Yet even forty millions over thirty-one
thousand square miles of territory is, in comparison with four millions
over fifty square miles, a highly diffused population.
How far will that possible diffusion accomplish itself? Let us first of
all consider the case of those classes that will be free to exercise a
choice in the matter, and we shall then be in a better position to
consider those more numerous classes whose general circumstances are
practically dictated to them. What will be the forces acting upon the
prosperous household, the household with a working head and four hundred
a year and upwards to live upon, in the days to come? Will the resultant
of these forces be, as a rule, centripetal or centrifugal? Will such
householders in the greater London of 2000 A.D. still cluster for the
most part, as they do to-day, in a group of suburbs as close to London
as is compatible with a certain fashionable maximum of garden space and
air; or will they leave the ripened gardens and the no longer brilliant
villas of Surbiton and Norwood, Tooting and Beckenham, to other and less
independent people? First, let us weigh the centrifugal attractions.
The first of these is what is known as the passion for nature, that
passion for hillside, wind, and sea that is evident in so many people
nowadays, either frankly expressed or disguising itself as a passion for
golfing, fishing, hunting, yachting, or cycling; and, secondly, there is
the allied charm of cultivation, and especially of gardening, a charm
that is partly also the love of dominion, perhaps, and partly a personal
love for the beauty of trees and flowers and natural things. Through
that we come to a third factor, that craving--strongest, perhaps, in
those Low German peoples, who are now ascendant throughout the
world--for a little private _imperium_ such as a house or cottage "in
its own grounds" affords; and from that we pass on to the intense desire
so many women feel--and just the women, too, who will mother the
future--their almost instinctive demand, indeed, for a household, a
separate sacred and distinctive household, built and ordered after their
own hearts, such as in its fulness only the country-side permits. Add to
these things the healthfulness of the country for young children, and
the wholesome isolation that is possible from much that irritates,
stimulates prematurely, and corrupts in crowded centres, and the chief
positive centrifugal inducements are stated, inducements that no
progress of inventions, at any rate, can ever seriously weaken. What now
are the centripetal forces against which these inducements contend?
In the first place, there are a group of forces that will diminish in
strength. There is at present the greater convenience of "shopping"
within a short radius of the centre of the great city, a very important
consideration indeed to many wives and mothers. All the inner and many
of the outer suburbs of London obtain an enormous proportion of the
ordinary household goods from half a dozen huge furniture, grocery, and
drapery firms, each of which has been enabled by the dearness and
inefficiency of the parcels distribution of the post-office and railways
to elaborate a now very efficient private system of taking orders and
delivering goods. Collectively these great businesses have been able to
establish a sort of monopoly of suburban trade, to overwhelm the small
suburban general tradesman (a fate that was inevitable for him in some
way or other), and--which is a positive world-wide misfortune--to
overwhelm also many highly specialized shops and dealers of the central
district. Suburban people nowadays get their wine and their novels,
their clothes and their amusements, their furniture and their food, from
some one vast indiscriminate shop or "store" full of respectable
mediocre goods, as excellent a thing for housekeeping as it is
disastrous to taste and individuality.[18] But it is doubtful if the
delivery organization of these great stores is any more permanent than
the token coinage of the tradespeople of the last century. Just as it
was with that interesting development, so now it is with parcels
distribution: private enterprise supplies in a partial manner a public
need, and with the organization of a public parcels and goods delivery
on cheap and sane lines in the place of our present complex, stupid,
confusing, untrustworthy, and fantastically costly chaos of post-office,
railways, and carriers, it is quite conceivable that Messrs. Omnium will
give place again to specialized shops.
It must always be remembered how timid, tentative, and dear the postal
and telephone services of even the most civilized countries still are,
and how inexorably the needs of revenue, public profit, and convenience
fight in these departments against the tradition of official leisure and
dignity. There is no reason now, except that the thing is not yet
properly organized, why a telephone call from any point in such a small
country as England to any other should cost much more than a postcard.
There is no reason now, save railway rivalries and retail
ideas--obstacles some able and active man is certain to sweep away
sooner or later--why the post-office should not deliver parcels anywhere
within a radius of a hundred miles in a few hours at a penny or less for
a pound and a little over,[19] put our newspapers in our letter-boxes
direct from the printing-office, and, in fact, hand in nearly every
constant need of the civilized household, except possibly butcher's
meat, coals, green-grocery, and drink. And since there is no reason, but
quite removable obstacles, to prevent this development of the
post-office, I imagine it will be doing all these things within the next
half-century. When it is, this particular centripetal pull, at any rate,
will have altogether ceased to operate.
A second important centripetal consideration at present is the
desirability of access to good schools and to the doctor. To leave the
great centres is either to abandon one's children, or to buy air for
them at the cost of educational disadvantages. But access, be it noted,
is another word for transit. It is doubtful if these two needs will so
much keep people close to the great city centres as draw them together
about secondary centres. New centres they may be--compare Hindhead, for
example--in many cases; but also, it may be, in many cases the more
healthy and picturesque of the existing small towns will develop a new
life. Already, in the case of the London area, such once practically
autonomous places as Guildford, Tunbridge Wells, and Godalming have
become economically the centres of lax suburbs, and the same fate may
very probably overtake, for example, Shrewsbury, Stratford, and Exeter,
and remoter and yet remoter townships. Indeed, for all that this
particular centripetal force can do, the confluent "residential suburbs"
of London, of the great Lancashire-Yorkshire city, and of the Scotch
city, may quite conceivably replace the summer lodging-house
watering-places of to-day, and extend themselves right round the coast
of Great Britain, before the end of the next century, and every open
space of mountain and heather be dotted--not too thickly--with clumps of
prosperous houses about school, doctor, engineers, book and provision
shops.
A third centripetal force will not be set aside so easily. The direct
antagonist it is to that love of nature that drives people out to moor
and mountain. One may call it the love of the crowd; and closely allied
to it is that love of the theatre which holds so many people in bondage
to the Strand. Charles Lamb was the Richard Jefferies of this group of
tendencies, and the current disposition to exaggerate the opposition
force, especially among English-speaking peoples, should not bind us to
the reality of their strength. Moreover, interweaving with these
influences that draw people together are other more egotistical and
intenser motives, ardent in youth and by no means--to judge by the
Folkestone Leas--extinct in age, the love of dress, the love of the
crush, the hot passion for the promenade. Here, no doubt, what one may
speak of loosely as "racial" characteristics count for much. The common
actor and actress of all nationalities, the Neapolitan, the modern
Roman, the Parisian, the Hindoo, I am told, and that new and interesting
type, the rich and liberated Jew emerging from his Ghetto and free now
absolutely to show what stuff he is made of, flame out most gloriously
in this direction. To a certain extent this group of tendencies may lead
to the formation of new secondary centres within the "available" area,
theatrical and musical centres--centres of extreme Fashion and
Selectness, centres of smartness and opulent display--but it is probable
that for the large number of people throughout the world who cannot
afford to maintain households in duplicate these will be for many years
yet strictly centripetal forces, and will keep them within the radius
marked by whatever will be the future equivalent in length of, say, the
present two-shilling cab ride in London.
And, after all, for all such "shopping" as one cannot do by telephone or
postcard, it will still be natural for the shops to be gathered together
in some central place. And "shopping" needs refreshment, and may
culminate in relaxation. So that Bond Street and Regent Street, the
Boulevard des Capuchins, the Corso, and Broadway will still be brilliant
and crowded for many years for all the diffusion that is here
forecast--all the more brilliant and crowded, perhaps, for the lack of a
thronging horse traffic down their central ways. But the very fact that
the old nucleus is still to be the best place for all who trade in a
concourse of people, for novelty shops and art shops, and theatres and
business buildings, by keeping up the central ground values will operate
against residence there and shift the "masses" outwardly.
And once people have been driven into cab, train, or omnibus, the only
reason why they should get out to a residence here rather than there is
the necessity of saving time, and such a violent upward gradient of
fares as will quite outbalance the downward gradient of ground values.
We have, however, already forecast a swift, varied, and inevitably
competitive suburban traffic. And so, though the centre will probably
still remain the centre and "Town," it will be essentially a bazaar, a
great gallery of shops and places of concourse and rendezvous, a
pedestrian place, its pathways reinforced by lifts and moving platforms,
and shielded from the weather, and altogether a very spacious,
brilliant, and entertaining agglomeration.
Enough now has been said to determine the general nature of the
expansion of the great cities in the future, so far as the more
prosperous classes are concerned. It will not be a regular diffusion
like the diffusion of a gas, but a process of throwing out the "homes,"
and of segregating various types of people. The omens seem to point
pretty unmistakably to a wide and quite unprecedented diversity in the
various suburban townships and suburban districts. Of that aspect of
the matter a later paper must treat. It is evident that from the outset
racial and national characteristics will tell in this diffusion. We are
getting near the end of the great Democratic, Wholesale, or Homogeneous
phase in the world's history. The sport-loving Englishman, the sociable
Frenchman, the vehement American will each diffuse his own great city in
his own way.
And now, how will the increase in the facilities of communication we
have assumed affect the condition of those whose circumstances are more
largely dictated by economic forces? The mere diffusion of a large
proportion of the prosperous and relatively free, and the multiplication
of various types of road and mechanical traction, means, of course, that
in this way alone a perceptible diffusion of the less independent
classes will occur. To the subsidiary centres will be drawn doctor and
schoolmaster, and various dealers in fresh provisions, baker, grocer,
butcher; or if they are already established there they will flourish
more and more, and about them the convenient home of the future, with
its numerous electrical and mechanical appliances, and the various
bicycles, motor-cars, photographic and phonographic apparatus that will
be included in its equipment will gather a population of repairers,
"accessory" dealers and working engineers, a growing class which from
its necessary intelligence and numbers will play a very conspicuous part
in the social development of the twentieth century. The much more
elaborate post-office and telephone services will also bring intelligent
ingredients to these suburban nuclei, these restorations of the old
villages and country towns. And the sons of the cottager within the
affected area will develop into the skilled vegetable or flower
gardeners, the skilled ostler--with some veterinary science--and so
forth, for whom also there will evidently be work and a living. And
dotted at every convenient position along the new roads, availing
themselves no doubt whenever possible of the picturesque inns that the
old coaching days have left us, will be wayside restaurants and tea
houses, and motor and cycle stores and repair places. So much diffusion
is practically inevitable.
In addition, as we have already intimated, many Londoners in the future
may abandon the city office altogether, preferring to do their business
in more agreeable surroundings. Such a business as book publishing, for
example, has no unbreakable bonds to keep it in the region of high rent
and congested streets. The days when the financial fortunes of books
depended upon the colloquial support of influential people in a small
Society are past; neither publishers nor authors as a class have any
relation to Society at all, and actual access to newspaper offices is
necessary only to the ranker forms of literary imposture. That personal
intercourse between publishers and the miscellaneous race of authors
which once justified the central position has, I am told, long since
ceased. And the withdrawing publishers may very well take with them the
printers and binders, and attract about them their illustrators and
designers.... So, as a typical instance, one--now urban--trade may
detach itself.
Publishing is, however, only one of the many similar trades equally
profitable and equally likely to move outward to secondary centres, with
the development and cheapening of transit. It is all a question of
transit. Limitation of transit contracts the city, facilitation expands
and disperses it. All this case for diffusion so far is built up
entirely on the hypothesis we attempted to establish in the first paper,
that transit of persons and goods alike is to become easier, swifter,
and altogether better organized than it is at present.
The telephone will almost certainly prove a very potent auxiliary indeed
to the forces making for diffusion. At present that convenience is still
needlessly expensive in Great Britain, and a scandalously stupid
business conflict between telephone company and post-office delays,
complicates, and makes costly and exasperating all trunk communications;
but even under these disadvantages the thing is becoming a factor in the
life of ordinary villadom. Consider all that lies within its
possibilities. Take first the domestic and social side; almost all the
labour of ordinary shopping can be avoided--goods nowadays can be
ordered and sent either as sold outright, or on approval, to any place
within a hundred miles of London, and in one day they can be examined,
discussed, and returned--at any rate, in theory. The mistress of the
house has all her local tradesmen, all the great London shops, the
circulating library, the theatre box-office, the post-office and
cab-rank, the nurses' institute and the doctor, within reach of her
hand. The instrument we may confidently expect to improve, but even now
speech is perfectly clear and distinct over several hundred miles of
wire. Appointments and invitations can be made; and at a cost varying
from a penny to two shillings any one within two hundred miles of home
may speak day or night into the ear of his or her household. Were it not
for that unmitigated public nuisance, the practical control of our
post-office by non-dismissable Civil servants, appointed so young as to
be entirely ignorant of the unofficial world, it would be possible now
to send urgent messages at any hour of the day or night to any part of
the world; and even our sacred institution of the Civil Service can
scarcely prevent this desirable consummation for many years more. The
business man may then sit at home in his library and bargain, discuss,
promise, hint, threaten, tell such lies as he dare not write, and, in
fact, do everything that once demanded a personal encounter. Already for
a great number of businesses it is no longer necessary that the office
should be in London, and only habit, tradition, and minor considerations
keep it there. With the steady cheapening and the steady increase in
efficiency of postal and telephonic facilities, and of goods transit, it
seems only reasonable to anticipate the need for that expensive office
and the irksome daily journey will steadily decline. In other words,
what will still be economically the "city," as distinguished from the
"agricultural" population, will probably be free to extend, in the case
of all the prosperous classes not tied to large establishments in need
of personal supervision, far beyond the extreme limits of the daily hour
journey.
But the diffusion of the prosperous, independent, and managing classes
involves in itself a very considerable diffusion of the purely "working"
classes also. Their centres of occupation will be distributed, and their
freedom to live at some little distance from their work will be
increased. Whether this will mean dotting the country with dull, ugly
little streets, slum villages like Buckfastleigh in Devon, for example,
or whether it may result in entirely different and novel aspects, is a
point for which at present we are not ready. But it bears upon the
question that ugliness and squalor upon the main road will appeal to the
more prosperous for remedy with far more vigour than when they are
stowed compactly in a slum.
Enough has been said to demonstrate that old "town" and "city" will be,
in truth, terms as obsolete as "mail coach." For these new areas that
will grow out of them we want a term, and the administrative "urban
district" presents itself with a convenient air of suggestion. We may
for our present purposes call these coming town provinces "urban
regions." Practically, by a process of confluence, the whole of Great
Britain south of the Highlands seems destined to become such an urban
region, laced all together not only by railway and telegraph, but by
novel roads such as we forecast in the former chapter, and by a dense
network of telephones, parcels delivery tubes, and the like nervous and
arterial connections.
It will certainly be a curious and varied region, far less monotonous
than our present English world, still in its thinner regions, at any
rate, wooded, perhaps rather more abundantly wooded, breaking
continually into park and garden, and with everywhere a scattering of
houses. These will not, as a rule, I should fancy, follow the fashion of
the vulgar ready-built villas of the existing suburb, because the
freedom people will be able to exercise in the choice of a site will rob
the "building estate" promoter of his local advantage; in many cases the
houses may very probably be personal homes, built for themselves as much
as the Tudor manor-houses were, and even, in some cases, as æsthetically
right. Each district, I am inclined to think, will develop its own
differences of type and style. As one travels through the urban region,
one will traverse open, breezy, "horsey" suburbs, smart white gates and
palings everywhere, good turf, a Grand Stand shining pleasantly;
gardening districts all set with gables and roses, holly hedges, and
emerald lawns; pleasant homes among heathery moorlands and golf links,
and river districts with gaily painted boat-houses peeping from the
osiers. Then presently a gathering of houses closer together, and a
promenade and a whiff of band and dresses, and then, perhaps, a little
island of agriculture, hops, or strawberry gardens, fields of
grey-plumed artichokes, white-painted orchard, or brightly neat poultry
farm. Through the varied country the new wide roads will run, here
cutting through a crest and there running like some colossal aqueduct
across a valley, swarming always with a multitudinous traffic of bright,
swift (and not necessarily ugly) mechanisms; and everywhere amidst the
fields and trees linking wires will stretch from pole to pole. Ever and
again there will appear a cluster of cottages--cottages into which we
shall presently look more closely--about some works or workings, works,
it may be, with the smoky chimney of to-day replaced by a gaily painted
windwheel or waterwheel to gather and store the force for the machinery;
and ever and again will come a little town, with its cherished ancient
church or cathedral, its school buildings and museums, its
railway-station, perhaps its fire-station, its inns and restaurants, and
with all the wires of the countryside converging to its offices. All
that is pleasant and fair of our present countryside may conceivably
still be there among the other things. There is no reason why the
essential charm of the country should disappear; the new roads will not
supersede the present high roads, which will still be necessary for
horses and subsidiary traffic; and the lanes and hedges, the field paths
and wild flowers, will still have their ample justification. A certain
lack of solitude there may be perhaps, and--
Will conspicuous advertisements play any part in the landscape?...
But I find my pen is running ahead, an imagination prone to realistic
constructions is struggling to paint a picture altogether prematurely.
There is very much to be weighed and decided before we can get from our
present generalization to the style of architecture these houses will
show, and to the power and nature of the public taste. We have laid down
now the broad lines of road, railway, and sea transit in the coming
century, and we have got this general prophecy of "urban regions"
established, and for the present that much must suffice.
And as for the world beyond our urban regions? The same line of
reasoning that leads to the expectation that the city will diffuse
itself until it has taken up considerable areas and many of the
characteristics, the greenness, the fresh air, of what is now country,
leads us to suppose also that the country will take to itself many of
the qualities of the city. The old antithesis will indeed cease, the
boundary lines will altogether disappear; it will become, indeed, merely
a question of more or less populous. There will be horticulture and
agriculture going on within the "urban regions," and "urbanity" without
them. Everywhere, indeed, over the land of the globe between the frozen
circles, the railway and the new roads will spread, the net-work of
communication wires and safe and convenient ways. To receive the daily
paper a few hours late, to wait a day or so for goods one has ordered,
will be the extreme measure of rusticity save in a few remote islands
and inaccessible places. The character of the meshes in that wider
network of roads that will be the country, as distinguished from the
urban district, will vary with the soil, the climate and the tenure of
the land--will vary, too, with the racial and national differences. But
throughout all that follows, this mere relativity of the new sort of
town to the new sort of country over which the new sorts of people we
are immediately to consider will be scattered, must be borne in mind.
* * * * *
[At the risk of insistence, I must repeat that, so far, I have been
studiously taking no account of the fact that there is such a thing as a
boundary line or a foreigner in the world. It will be far the best thing
to continue to do this until we can get out all that will probably
happen universally or generally, and in particular the probable changes
in social forces, social apparatus and internal political methods. We
shall then come to the discussion of language, nationality and
international conflicts, equipped with such an array of probabilities
and possibilities as will enable us to guess at these special issues
with an appearance of far more precision than would be the case if we
considered them now.]