large cities are concerned, it would appear that
their endeavour to escape beyond the limits of congested city life has
hitherto been unavailing: the decentralising forces of rising ground
rents, uncomfortable and insanitary dwellings, are ever at work, but
the centralising forces set up by any large number who seek an outlet
in the same direction, with close spacial limitations to their
migrating tendency, are too strong. High rents, a fuller appreciation
of the hygienic advantages of more space, and of proximity to country
air and country scenes, have induced an increasing number of the
"middle" classes, and even of those who, in a pecuniary sense, form
the upper working class, to incur the expenditure of time, trouble,
and railway fares involved in living sufficiently far from the centre
to avoid the centralising pressure. The most important practical
problem of social reform to-day is how to secure this option of
extra-city life for the mass of city workers. If the economies of low
ground rent and slightly cheaper labour were sufficiently large to
induce the establishment of manufactories at considerable distances
from large centres of population, we might look in time to see the
large industrial town give place to a number of industrial villages,
gathered round some single large factory or "works." The growing
facilities of communication with large towns at increased distances,
afforded by recent expansions of railway service, and by improvements
in telegraphic and telephonic media, have done something towards this
form of decentralisation. Round Manchester and other larger northern
manufacturing towns an increasing number of factories are springing
up; in the United States the same phenomenon is still commoner.
Smaller rents, cheaper living, lower wages, especially in textile
mills where women are largely employed, and lastly, more submissive
labour, are everywhere the economic stimuli of this decentralisation
of manufacture. Assuming that some more cheaply and easily
transmissible motor-power can be found for manufacture, and that a
cheap and readily available transport service by steam or electricity
is widely spread, it seems not unlikely that the economies of
decentralised manufacture may widely or even universally outweigh the
primary centralising economies which created our great manufacturing
towns. Whether a wide diffusion of industrial villages, which might be
of a size and structure to reproduce in a som