alley. That valley contains London, which is, of course,
not only far the largest but in its way the fullest example of what is
peculiarly English in the development of town life; and it contains,
in the modern rise of Oxford and Reading, two of the very best
instances to show how the English town in its modern aspect has sprung
from the industrial system and from the introduction of railways. For
neither has any natural facilities for production, and the growth of
each in the nineteenth century has been wholly artificial.

The most recent change of all, with which these notes will end, is,
one need hardly say, this industrial transformation. It has made a
completely new England, and it nourishes the only civilised population
in the world which is out of touch with arms, and with the physical
life and nature of the country it inhabits, and the only population in
which the vast majority are concerned with things of which they have
no actual experience, and feel most strongly upon matters dictated to
them at second or third hand by the proprietors of great journals.

What that new England will become none of us can tell; we cannot even
tell whether the considerable problem of maintaining it as an
organised civilisation will or will not be solved. All the conditions
are so completely new, our whole machinery of government so thoroughly
presupposes a little aristocratic agricultural state, and our strong
attachment to form and ritual so hampers all attempts at
reorganisation, that the way in which we shall answer, if we do
answer, the question of this sphinx, cannot as yet even be guessed at.

But long before the various historical causes at work had begun to
produce the great modern English town, long before the use of coal,
the development of the navy, and, above all, the active political
transformation of our rivals during the eighteenth century, had given
us that industrial supremacy which we have but recently lost, the
English town was a thing with characteristics of its own in Europe.

In the first place, it was not municipal in the Roman sense. The sharp
distinction which the Roman Empire and the modern French Republic,
and, from the example of that republic, the whole of Western Europe,
establish between town and country, comes from the fact that European
thought, method of government, and the rest, were formed on the
Mediterranean: but the civilisation of the Mediterranean was one of
city states; the modern civi