pon which
public attention is so powerfully concentrated, would be the
assistance it would render to enable workmen and workwomen to live at
a longer distance from their work. So long, however, as a large
proportion of city workers have no security of tenure in their work,
are liable at a day's or a week's notice, for no fault of their own,
to be obliged to seek work under another employer in a distant
locality, or if employed by the same master to be sent to a distant
job, now to find themselves without any work at all, at another time
to have to work all hours to make up a subsistence wage, it is evident
that these schemes of decentralisation can be but partial in their
application. An increased stability both in the several trades and in
the individual businesses within the trade is a first requisite to the
establishment of a fixed healthy home for the industrial worker and
his family.

Sec. 11. It is, however, unlikely that any wide or lasting solution of
the problem of congested town life will be found in a sharp local
severance of the life of an industrial society which shall abandon the
town to the purposes of a huge workshop, reserving the country for
habitation. The true unity of individual and social life forbids this
abrupt cleavage between the arts of production and consumption,
between the man and his work. It is only in the case of the largest
and densest industrial cities, swollen to an unwieldy and dangerous
size, that such methods of decentralisation can in some measure be
applied. In these monstrous growths machinery of decentralisation may
be evoked to undo in part at any rate the work of centralising
machinery. In smaller towns, where the circumference bears a larger
proportion to the mass, a spreading of the close-packed population
over an expanded town-area will be more feasible, and will form the
first step in that series of reforms which shall humanise the
industrial town. The congestion of the poorer population of our towns,
and the struggle for fresh air and elbow-room which it implies, is
the most formidable barrier to the work of transforming the town from
a big workshop into a human dwelling-place, with an individual life, a
character, a soul of its own. The true reform policy is not to destroy
the industrial town but to breathe into it the breath of social life,
to temper and subordinate its industrial machine-goods-producing
character to the higher and more complex purposes of social life