ely dependent on the modern machinery of transport, and in the
main these great centres must be regarded as manufacturing and
commercial towns.

Though the lack of any common statistical basis prevents us from being
able to trace with exactitude the comparative pace of this movement in
different countries, we know enough to justify the general conclusion
that this centralising tendency varies directly with the degree of
material civilisation attained in the several countries by the mass of
the population. In England, France, United States, Australia, where
steam engines, electric light, newspapers, and all the most highly
elaborated mechanical contrivances are available in towns, the growth
of town life is most rapid; in Russia, Turkey, India, Egypt, where
mechanical development is still far behind, the townward march is far
slower. As the area of machine-industry spreads, so this movement of
population will become more general, and as towns grow larger so it
would appear that this power to suck in the rural population is
stronger and more extensive.

Sec. 3. These facts and figures do not, however, of themselves justify
the conclusion that a larger proportion of the world's population is
moving into towns. In all the advanced industrial countries a smaller
proportion of the population is engaged in those extractive and
domestic industries which belong to rural life, a larger proportion in
the manufacturing and distributive industries which belong to towns.
But this movement is made possible by the fact that an increasing
proportion of the food and the raw materials of manufacture used in
these countries is drawn from the labour of the more backward
countries. The increase of the area of the industrial world is
effecting such a division of labour as hands over an ever-increasing
proportion of the agricultural work to the inhabitants of those
countries which do not rank as civilised industrial countries. The
known growth of certain large trading centres in India, China, Egypt,
South Africa, etc., does not justify us, in the absence of careful
statistical inquiry, in assuming that an increased proportion of the
inhabitants of these and other more backward portions of the globe is
passing into town life. Unless agricultural machinery and improved
agricultural methods are advancing more rapidly in these great
"growing areas" than we have a right to suppose, it would seem that
there must be some increased demand for agricu