uestion is still in
dispute) somewhere in the closing decades of the nineteenth century,
its work, the continual active planning and replanning of the world as
a place of human habitation, is now so to speak the collective material
activity of the race. The spontaneous, disorderly spreadings and
recessions of populations, as aimless and mechanical as the trickling
of spilt water, which was the substance of history for endless years,
giving rise here to congestions, here to chronic devastating wars, and
everywhere to a discomfort and disorderliness that was at its best only
picturesque, is at an end. Men spread now, with the whole power of the
race to aid them, into every available region of the earth. Their
cities are no longer tethered to running water and the proximity
of cultivation, their plans are no longer affected by strategic
considerations or thoughts of social insecurity. The aeroplane and
the nearly costless mobile car have abolished trade routes; a common
language and a universal law have abolished a thousand restraining
inconveniences, and so an astonishing dispersal of habitations has
begun. One may live anywhere. And so it is that our cities now are true
social gatherings, each with a character of its own and distinctive
interests of its own, and most of them with a common occupation. They
lie out in the former deserts, these long wasted sun-baths of the race,
they tower amidst eternal snows, they hide in remote islands, and bask
on broad lagoons. For a time the whole tendency of mankind was to desert
the river valleys in which the race had been cradled for half a million
years, but now that the War against Flies has been waged so successfully
that this pestilential branch of life is nearly extinct, they are
returning thither with a renewed appetite for gardens laced by
watercourses, for pleasant living amidst islands and houseboats and
bridges, and for nocturnal lanterns reflected by the sea.

Man who is ceasing to be an agricultural animal becomes more and more a
builder, a traveller, and a maker. How much he ceases to be a cultivator
of the soil the returns of the Redistribution Committee showed. Every
year the work of our scientific laboratories increases the productivity
and simplifies the labour of those who work upon the soil, and the food
now of the whole world is produced by less than one per cent. of its
population, a percentage which still tends to decrease. Far fewer people
are needed upon the