the old towns and brought men at the remotest quarters of the earth
into business competition. Big towns of the modern type, with
half-a-million inhabitants or more, grew up rapidly all over Europe
and America. For the European big towns are as modern as New York, and
the East End and south side of London scarcely older than Chicago.
Shopkeeping, like manufactures, began to concentrate in large
establishments, and big wholesale distribution to replace individual
buying and selling. As the need for public education under the
changing conditions of life grew more and more urgent, the individual
enterprise of this school-master and that gave place to the organized
effort of such giant societies as (in Britain) the old National School
Society and the British School Society, and at last to State
education. And one after another the old prosperous middle-class
callings fell under the stress of the new development.

The process still goes on, and there can be little doubt of the
ultimate issue. The old small manufacturers are either ruined or
driven into sweating and the slums; the old coaching innkeeper and
common carrier have been impoverished or altogether superseded by the
railways and big carrier companies; the once flourishing shopkeeper
lives to-day on the mere remnants of the trade that great distributing
stores or the branches of great companies have left him. Tea
companies, provision-dealing companies, tobacconist companies, make
the position of the old-established private shop unstable and the
chances of the new beginner hopeless. Railways and tramways take the
custom more and more effectually past the door of the small draper and
outfitter to the well-stocked establishments at the centre of things;
telephone and telegraph assist that shopping at the centre more and
more. The small "middle-class" school-master finds himself beaten by
revived endowed schools and by new public endowments; the small
doctor, the local dentist, find Harley Street always nearer to them
and practitioners in motor-cars from the great centres playing havoc
with their practices. And while the small men are more and more
distressed, the great organizations of trade, of production, of public
science, continue to grow and coalesce, until at last they grow into
national or even world trusts, or into publicly-owned monopolies. In
America slaughtering and selling meat has grown into a trust, steel
and iron are trustified, mineral oil is all gathere