nd there of
the great religious foundations. Windsor, Wallingford, Reading,
Abingdon, and even Oxford, were towns appearing to him much as
Lechlade to-day remains or Abingdon still. As for the riverside
villages their agricultural and native population was certainly larger
than that which they now possess; and in general the effect produced
upon such a journey was of a sort of even distribution of population
gradually increasing from the loneliness of the upper river to the
growing sites between Windsor and London, but in no part exaggerated;
larger everywhere in proportion to the importance of the stream, or of
agricultural or of strategical position, and forming together one
united countryside, bound together even in its architecture by the
common commerce of the river.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did little to disturb this
equilibrium or to destroy this even tradition. The opening up of the
waterways and the great improvement of the highroads, and the building
of bridges, and the expansion of wealth at the end of the eighteenth
century had indeed some considerable effect in increasing the
population of England as a whole, but the smaller country towns, in
the south at least, and in the Thames Valley, seem to have benefited
fairly equally from the general change. The new canals, entering at
Oxford and at Reading, gave a certain lead to both those centres, and
even the Severn Canal, entering at Lechlade, did a little for that
up-river town. The new fashion of the public schools (which had now
long been captured by the wealthier classes) also increased the
importance of Eton, and towards the close of the period the now
rapidly expanding capital had overfed the villages within reach of
London with a considerable accession of population. But it is
remarkable how evenly spread was even this industrial development.

The twin towns of Abingdon and Reading, for instance, twin
monasteries, twin corporations, had for all these centuries preserved
their ratio of the up-country town and the larger centre that was the
neighbour of London and Windsor. In the beginning of the nineteenth
century, in spite of the general increase of population, that ratio
was still well preserved: it is about three to one. But the Railway
found one and left the other.

The Railway came, and in our own generation that ratio began to change
out of all knowledge. It grows from four, five, six, to _seven_ to
one. After a short halt you h