icultural 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 hit