[264]Report on Principal Textile Trades, p. xxv.
[264]Report on Principal Textile Trades, p. xxv.
[265]The evidence adduced by Dr. Arlidge in hisDiseases of Occupationsregarding the effects of factory life upon the physique of children is conclusive. See p. 38, etc.
[265]The evidence adduced by Dr. Arlidge in hisDiseases of Occupationsregarding the effects of factory life upon the physique of children is conclusive. See p. 38, etc.
[266]See Appendix on Factory Legislation.
[266]See Appendix on Factory Legislation.
§ 1.The Modern Industrial Town as a Machine-product.§ 2.Growth of Town as compared with Rural Population in the Old and New Worlds.§ 3.Limits imposed upon the Townward Movement by the Economic Conditions of World-industry.§ 4.Effect of increasing Town-life upon Mortality.§ 5.The impaired quality of Physical Life in Towns.§ 6.The Intellectual Education of Town-life.§ 7.The Moral Education of Town-life.§ 8.Economic Forces making for Decentralisation.§ 9.Desirability of Public Control of Transport Services to effect Decentralisation.§ 10.Long Hours and Insecurity of Work as Obstacles to Reforms.§ 11.The Principle of Internal Reform of Town-life.
§ 1.The Modern Industrial Town as a Machine-product.
§ 2.Growth of Town as compared with Rural Population in the Old and New Worlds.
§ 3.Limits imposed upon the Townward Movement by the Economic Conditions of World-industry.
§ 4.Effect of increasing Town-life upon Mortality.
§ 5.The impaired quality of Physical Life in Towns.
§ 6.The Intellectual Education of Town-life.
§ 7.The Moral Education of Town-life.
§ 8.Economic Forces making for Decentralisation.
§ 9.Desirability of Public Control of Transport Services to effect Decentralisation.
§ 10.Long Hours and Insecurity of Work as Obstacles to Reforms.
§ 11.The Principle of Internal Reform of Town-life.
§ 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 economyobtained 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, æsthetic, 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 mediæval 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 andtown 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.
§ 2. In England,par excellencethe 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]62.364.866.671.7Rural Population37.735.233.428.3
During the decennium 1881-91 there was a considerable check in the immigration from the country into thelarge 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]
Growth of French PopulationGROWTH OF FRENCH POPULATION.
GROWTH OF FRENCH POPULATION.
This flow of population to the towns is not affected toany 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:—
growth of the chief European centres of population
The figures relating to Germany are peculiarly instructive upon this point:—
Per Cent.Times in which such rate occurred.Town Districts.Rural Districts.Increase.303—25-302—20-2510115-2033211-1565—9-115545-950353-58691-3—560-1128Decrease.1-01183-1—225-3—30-5—4
German Empire.1871.1886.Rate of Increase.Towns over 100,0001,968,0003,327,00069 per cent.Towns over 20,0003,147,0004,147,00031 per cent.Towns over 5,0004,588,0005,694,00024 per cent.Towns over 2,0005,086,0005,734,00012 per cent.Rural Population26,219,00026,318,0003 per cent.
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:—
Growth of City Population in the United StatesGROWTH OF CITY POPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES.
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]12,40714,09119,264London15,82626,26631,977Ottawa21,54531,30744,154Hamilton26,71735,96148,980Toronto56,09296,196181,220132,586203,821325,595
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 certainEuropean 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.
§ 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 agriculturalmachinery 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 seemà prioriunlikely 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.
§ 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.
Years.Annual Deaths per 1000.Deaths in Town Districts to 100 Deaths in Country in equal numbers living.England and Wales.Town.Country.1851-6022.224.719.91241861-7022.524.819.71261871-8021.423.119.0122188118.920.116.9119188219.620.917.3121188319.520.517.9115188419.520.617.7117188519.019.717.8111188619.320.018.0111188718.819.717.2115188817.820.917.4114188917.919.316.4118189020.917.4120
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. TheReport 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 ruralpopulation 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.1886.France.1877-80.0 to 1 year230?170?1 to 5 years58.22815 to 20 years9.1630 to 40 years13.61060 to 70 years51.241
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 consumedmore rapidly than the rest of the population. The system is one which leads to the survival of the unfittest."
§ 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 theimpassewhich 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 interestattending 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.
(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 interestattending 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 ofgreat 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.
§ 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 industrialcompetition, 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.
§ 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 positiveattainments 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 themoraleof the town worker is the precariousand 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 annalsof 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 ofmoralewhich 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.
§ 8. But powerful as these centralising forces have been during the last century and a half, we are not justified inassuming 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 istrue 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. Sofar 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 createdour 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 æsthetic 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 theentrepreneurto 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]
§ 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 netgain 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, ifone may judge by the remarkable expansion of its use, it seems likely to afford no trifling assistance to the decentralising tendencies.
§ 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.
§ 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 thestruggle 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 æsthetic 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.