nd and
supply, told the then predominant middle classes just what they wished
to be told. Adam Smith had made the wonderful discovery that money and
wealth were not the same thing. Then Ricardo, and after him the
Manchester School of economists, made division of labour the cardinal
virtue in the new gospel of wealth. In order to give full play to this
economic principle all workers in mechanical industries were huddled
together in the towns. There they were to be transformed from
capricious, undisciplined humans into mechanical attachments, and
restricted to such functions as steam-driven automata had not yet
learned to perform. That was the first stage of the Industrial
Revolution, with its chief consequences, the rural exodus and urban
overcrowding. It is a hideous nightmare to look back upon from these
more enlightened days. Well might the angels weep over the flight of all
that was best from the God-made country to the man-made town.

Before the middle of the last century the clouds began to lift. For a
while the good Lord Shaftesbury seemed to be crying in the wilderness of
middle-class plutocracy, but it was not long before the crying of the
children in their factories stirred the national conscience. The health
of nations was allowed to be considered as well as their wealth. Social
and political science rose up in protest against both the economists and
the manufacturers. There followed a period of beneficent social changes,
no less radical than those which the new mechanical inventions had
produced in the economics of industry. The factory town of to-day
presents a strange contrast to that which sacrificed humanity to
material aggrandisement. What with its shortened hours of labour,
superior artisan dwellings, improved sanitation, parks, open spaces and
playgrounds, free instruction and cheap entertainment for old and young,
hospitals and charities, rapid transportation, a popular Press, and full
political freedom, the modern hive of industry stands as a monument of
what, under liberal laws, can be done by education and organisation to
realise the higher aspirations of a people.

During this second period, another economic development produced upon
the attitude of the urban mind towards the rural population an effect to
which, I think, has not been given the consideration it deserves. Better
and cheaper transportation, with the consequent establishment of what
the economists call the world-market, completely ch