eenth 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 maelstroms. 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