wn satisfaction to notice any
absurdity in his preoccupation with these theories about the population
of the world in the face of her immediate practical difficulties. He
declared that the onset of this new phase in human life, the modern
phase, wherein there was apparently to be no more "proliferating," but
instead a settling down of population towards a stable equilibrium,
became apparent first with the expropriation of the English peasantry
and the birth of the factory system and machine production. "Since that
time one can trace a steady substitution of wholesale and collective
methods for household and family methods. It has gone far with us now.
Instead of the woman drawing water from a well, the pipes and taps of
the water company. Instead of the home-made rushlight, the electric
lamp. Instead of home-spun, ready-made clothes. Instead of home-brewed,
the brewer's cask. Instead of home-baked, first the little baker and
then, clean and punctual, the International Bread and Cake Stores.
Instead of the child learning at its mother's knee, the compulsory
elementary school. Flats take the place of separate houses. Instead of
the little holding, the big farm, and instead of the children working
at home, the factory. Everywhere synthesis. Everywhere the little
independent proprietor gives place to the company and the company to the
trust. You follow all this, Lady Harman?"

"Go on," she said, encouraged by that transitory glimpse of the Stores
in his discourse.

"Now London--and England generally--had its period of expansion and got
on to the beginnings at least of this period of synthesis that is
following it, sooner than any other country in the world; and because it
was the first to reach the new stage it developed the characteristics of
the new stage with a stronger flavour of the old than did such later
growths of civilization as New York or Bombay or Berlin. That is why
London and our British big cities generally are congestions of little
houses, little homes, while the newer great cities run to apartments and
flats. We hadn't grasped the logical consequences of what we were in for
so completely as the people abroad did who caught it later, and that is
why, as we began to develop our new floating population of mainly
celibate employees and childless people, they had mostly to go into
lodgings, they went into the homes that were intended for families as
accessories to the family, and they were able to go in because