w chapters we have examined some of the influences
of modern machine-production upon men and women in the capacity of
producers, in relation to character, duration, intensity, regularity
of employment, the remuneration of labour, and the economic relations
which subsist between workers and employers. It remains to give
special consideration to one factor in the environment of modern
industrial life, which is of paramount importance upon the public,
both in its working and living capacity.

The biggest, and in some respects the most characteristic of
machine-products is the modern industrial town. Steam-power is in a
most literal sense the maker of the modern town. When the motive-power
of industrial work was chiefly confined to the forces stored in man,
the economy obtained by collecting larger numbers of men to work in
close proximity to one another was comparatively small, and was
commonly outweighed by the difficulty of securing for them a
sufficient supply of food and other commodities, and by the greater
immobility of labour at a time when fixed local associations were a
strong binding force, and transport was slow and expensive. When the
earlier machinery drew its motive-power chiefly from water, the local
attachment and wide distribution of this power prevented the
concentration of industry from advancing very far. Only in proportion
as steam-power became the dominating agent did the economies of
factory-production drive the workers to crowd ever more densely in the
districts where coal and water for generating steam were most
accessible, and to throng together for the most economical use of
steam-power in industry.

This rapid appreciation of the economies of centralised production,
heedless of all considerations, sanitary, aesthetic, moral, found a
hasty business expression in these huge hideous conglomerations of
factory buildings, warehouses, and cheap workmen's shelters, which
make the modern industrial town. The requirements of a decent,
healthy, harmonious individual or civic life played no appreciable
part in the rapid transformation of the mediaeval residential centre,
or the scattered industrial village into the modern manufacturing
town. Considerations of cheap profitable work were paramount;
considerations of life were almost utterly ignored. So swift,
heedless, anarchic has this process been, that no adequate provisions
were made for securing the prime conditions of healthy, physical
existence req