ty emerge, and
the less does the political importance of purely productive areas
appear. The mountain districts of Spain, the Cornish peninsula, were
centres of metallic industry of the first importance to the Romans,
but they remained poor throughout the period of Roman civilisation.
To-day the farmer in the west of America, the miner and the clerk in
Johannesburg, are perhaps more numerous, but as a political force no
wealthier for the opportunities of their sites: the economic power
which they ultimately produce is first concentrated in the centres of
exchange where the wealth they produce is handled.

Now there is a third basis for the economic importance of a district,
and as this third basis is indefinitely more important than the other
two, it has naturally been overlooked in the analysis of the
universities. This basis is the basis of residence. Given that a
conqueror, or a seat of Government established by routine, is
established in a particular place and chooses there to remain; or
given that the pleasure attached to a particular site--its natural
pleasures or the inherited grandeur of its buildings or what not--make
it an established residence for those who control the expenditure of
wealth, then that place will acquire an economic importance which has
for its foundation nothing more material than the human will. Thither
wealth, wherever produced, will flow, and there will be discovered
that ultimate motive force of all production and of all exchange, the
effective demand of those possessors who alone can set the industrial
machine in motion.

This has been abundantly true in every period of the world's history,
whenever commerce existed upon a considerable scale, or whenever a
military force sufficiently universal was at the command of wealthy
men.

It is particularly true to-day. To-day not the natural centres of
exchange, still less the natural centres of production, determine what
places in the world shall be wealthy and what shall not. The surplus
of the wealth produced by the Egyptian fellaheen is carefully
collected by English officials and largely consumed in Paris; the
wealth produced by the manufacturers of North England is largely spent
in the south of England and upon the Continent; until their recent and
successful revolt, the wealth produced by the Irish peasantry was
largely spent in London and upon the Riviera.

The economic importance, then, of the Thames Valley has not
diminished, but