r present countryside may conceivably
still be there among the other things. There is no reason why the
essential charm of the country should disappear; the new roads will not
supersede the present high roads, which will still be necessary for
horses and subsidiary traffic; and the lanes and hedges, the field paths
and wild flowers, will still have their ample justification. A certain
lack of solitude there may be perhaps, and--

Will conspicuous advertisements play any part in the landscape?...

But I find my pen is running ahead, an imagination prone to realistic
constructions is struggling to paint a picture altogether prematurely.
There is very much to be weighed and decided before we can get from our
present generalization to the style of architecture these houses will
show, and to the power and nature of the public taste. We have laid down
now the broad lines of road, railway, and sea transit in the coming
century, and we have got this general prophecy of "urban regions"
established, and for the present that much must suffice.

And as for the world beyond our urban regions? The same line of
reasoning that leads to the expectation that the city will diffuse
itself until it has taken up considerable areas and many of the
characteristics, the greenness, the fresh air, of what is now country,
leads us to suppose also that the country will take to itself many of
the qualities of the city. The old antithesis will indeed cease, the
boundary lines will altogether disappear; it will become, indeed, merely
a question of more or less populous. There will be horticulture and
agriculture going on within the "urban regions," and "urbanity" without
them. Everywhere, indeed, over the land of the globe between the frozen
circles, the railway and the new roads will spread, the net-work of
communication wires and safe and convenient ways. To receive the daily
paper a few hours late, to wait a day or so for goods one has ordered,
will be the extreme measure of rusticity save in a few remote islands
and inaccessible places. The character of the meshes in that wider
network of roads that will be the country, as distinguished from the
urban district, will vary with the soil, the climate and the tenure of
the land--will vary, too, with the racial and national differences. But
throughout all that follows, this mere relativity of the new sort of
town to the new sort of country over which the new sorts of people we
are immediately to cons