ices, fares and freights pursue the sweated
working expenses to the vanishing point, and the land occupied sink to
the level of not very eligible building sites: yet the railways will,
nevertheless, continue in operation until these downward limits are
positively attained.

An imagination prone to the picturesque insists at this stage upon a
vision of the latter days of one of the less happily situated lines.
Along a weedy embankment there pants and clangs a patched and tarnished
engine, its paint blistered, its parts leprously dull. It is driven by
an aged and sweated driver, and the burning garbage of its furnace
distils a choking reek into the air. A huge train of urban dust trucks
bangs and clatters behind it, _en route_ to that sequestered dumping
ground where rubbish is burnt to some industrial end. But that is a
lapse into the merely just possible, and at most a local tragedy. Almost
certainly the existing lines of railway will develop and differentiate,
some in one direction and some in another, according to the nature of
the pressure upon them. Almost all will probably be still in existence
and in divers ways busy, spite of the swarming new highways I have
ventured to foreshadow, a hundred years from now.

In fact, we have to contemplate, not so much a supersession of the
railways as a modification and specialization of them in various
directions, and the enormous development beside them of competing and
supplementary methods. And step by step with these developments will
come a very considerable acceleration of the ferry traffic of the narrow
seas through such improvements as the introduction of turbine engines.
So far as the high road and the longer journeys go this is the extent of
our prophecy.[10]

But in the discussion of all questions of land locomotion one must come
at last to the knots of the network, to the central portions of the
towns, the dense, vast towns of our time, with their high ground values
and their narrow, already almost impassable, streets. I hope at a later
stage to give some reasons for anticipating that the centripetal
pressure of the congested towns of our epoch may ultimately be very
greatly relieved, but for the next few decades at least the usage of
existing conditions will prevail, and in every town there is a certain
nucleus of offices, hotels, and shops upon which the centrifugal forces
I anticipate will certainly not operate. At present the streets of many
larger towns, and