ewhat less virulent form
many of the physical and moral vices of the larger towns, and which
possibly might retard or nullify some of the educative and elevating
influences springing from the organisation and co-operative action of
large masses of workers, can be regarded as a desirable substitute or
remedy for our congested city life, is open to grave doubt. A whole
country like England, thickly blotched at even intervals by big
industrial villages comprised of a huge factory or two with a few
rectangular streets of small, dull, grimy, red-brick cottages, and one
or two mansions standing inside their parks at the side remote from
the factories, would, from an aesthetic point of view, be repulsive to
the last degree; and out of a country, the whole of which was thus
ordered for pure purposes of industrial economy, it is difficult to
believe that any of the higher products of human effort could proceed.
But the possibility of some such outcome of the decentralising forces
already visible must not be ignored. It is even likely that the labour
movement, advancing as it does more rapidly in large manufacturing
centres than elsewhere, may, by increasing the freedom and power of
labour associated upon a large scale, apply an additional stimulus to
the _entrepreneur_ to place his business undertakings so as to make
strongly combined action of labourers more difficult. American
manufacturers are distinctly actuated by this motive in selecting the
locality of their factories, and have been able in many cases to
maintain a despotic control over the workers which would be quite
impossible were their factories planted in the middle of a large
city.[287]

Sec. 9. This method of partial decentralisation depends in large measure,
it is evident, upon such progress in the transport services for
persons, goods, and intelligence as shall minimise the inconvenience
of a less central position, rendering the location of the business a
matter of comparative indifference. But it is to improved transport
services that we may look to facilitate a kind of decentralisation,
the net gain of which is less dubious than that arising from the
substitution of a large number of industrial villages for a small
number of industrial towns. Is it not possible for more town-workers
to combine centralised work with decentralised life--to work in the
town but to live in the country? May not this advantage, at present
confined to the wealthier classes, be broug