II

THE PROBABLE DIFFUSION OF GREAT CITIES

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 tim