. An
ample, far-sighted, enlightened, social control over the whole area of
city ground, whether used for dwellings or for industrial purposes, is
the first condition of the true municipal life. The industrial town,
left for its growth to individual industrial control, compresses into
unhealthily close proximity large numbers of persons drawn together
from different quarters of the earth, with different and often
antagonistic aims, with little knowledge of one another, with no
important common end to form a bond of social sympathy. The town
presents the single raw material of local proximity out of which
municipal life is to be built. The first business of the municipal
reformer then is to transform this excessive proximity into wholesome
neighbourhood, in order that true neighbourly feelings may have room
to grow and thrive, and eventually to ripen into the flower of a fair
civic life. "A modern city," it has been well said, "is probably the
most impersonal combination of individuals that has ever been formed
in the world's history."[288] To evoke the personal human qualities of
this medley of city workers so as to reach within the individual the
citizen, to educate the civic feeling until it take shape in civic
activities and institutions, which shall not only safeguard the public
welfare against the encroachments of private industrial greed, but
shall find an ever ampler and nobler expression in the aesthetic beauty
and spiritual dignity of a complex, common life--all this work of
transformation lies in front of the democracy, grouped in its
ever-increasing number of town-units.

FOOTNOTES:

[267] According to Arthur Young, in 1770 half the population was
already urban. But though the townward drift, owing in large measure
to the land-hunger of the aristocracy and wealthy merchant class, and
the labour-saving economy of large farming, was clearly visible before
the development of machine-industry, it is probable that Young's
estimate goes beyond the facts.

[268] Mr. Cannan points out that this is due on the one hand to the
healthier conditions of the towns whose natural increase is larger; on
the other hand, to an increased migration from the rural parts to
foreign countries. ("The Decline of Urban Immigration," _National
Review_, January 1894.)

[269] Ravenstein, _Statistical Journal_, June 1889.

[270] _Preliminary Report_ (c. 6422), p. 23.

[271] It is often pointed out that an Urban Sanitary District is