itable that the increase of each city in the world
must come at last upon arrest.

Yet, though one may find reasons for anticipating that this city will in
the end overtake and surpass that one and such-like relative
prophesying, it is difficult to find any data from which to infer the
absolute numerical limits of these various diffused cities. Or perhaps
it is more seemly to admit that no such data have occurred to the
writer. So far as London, St. Petersburg, and Berlin go, it seems fairly
safe to assume that they will go well over twenty millions; and that New
York, Philadelphia, and Chicago will probably, and Hankow almost
certainly, reach forty millions. Yet even forty millions over thirty-one
thousand square miles of territory is, in comparison with four millions
over fifty square miles, a highly diffused population.

How far will that possible diffusion accomplish itself? Let us first of
all consider the case of those classes that will be free to exercise a
choice in the matter, and we shall then be in a better position to
consider those more numerous classes whose general circumstances are
practically dictated to them. What will be the forces acting upon the
prosperous household, the household with a working head and four hundred
a year and upwards to live upon, in the days to come? Will the resultant
of these forces be, as a rule, centripetal or centrifugal? Will such
householders in the greater London of 2000 A.D. still cluster for the
most part, as they do to-day, in a group of suburbs as close to London
as is compatible with a certain fashionable maximum of garden space and
air; or will they leave the ripened gardens and the no longer brilliant
villas of Surbiton and Norwood, Tooting and Beckenham, to other and less
independent people? First, let us weigh the centrifugal attractions.

The first of these is what is known as the passion for nature, that
passion for hillside, wind, and sea that is evident in so many people
nowadays, either frankly expressed or disguising itself as a passion for
golfing, fishing, hunting, yachting, or cycling; and, secondly, there is
the allied charm of cultivation, and especially of gardening, a charm
that is partly also the love of dominion, perhaps, and partly a personal
love for the beauty of trees and flowers and natural things. Through
that we come to a third factor, that craving--strongest, perhaps, in
those Low German peoples, who are now ascendant throughout the
world