herto been
impossible--concentrating the trade of vast areas in a manner that had
hitherto been entirely characteristic of navigable waters. It might seem
as though the state of affairs in China, in which population has been
concentrated about densely-congested "million-cities," with pauper
masses, public charities, and a crowded struggle for existence, for many
hundreds of years, was merely to be extended over the whole world. We
have heard so much of the "problem of our great cities"; we have the
impressive statistics of their growth; the belief in the inevitableness
of yet denser and more multitudinous agglomerations in the future is so
widely diffused, that at first sight it will be thought that no other
motive than a wish to startle can dictate the proposition that not only
will many of these railway-begotten "giant cities" reach their maximum
in the commencing century, but that in all probability they, and not
only they, but their water-born prototypes in the East also, are
destined to such a process of dissection and diffusion as to amount
almost to obliteration, so far, at least, as the blot on the map goes,
within a measurable further space of years.

In advancing this proposition, the present writer is disagreeably aware
that in this matter he has expressed views entirely opposed to those he
now propounds; and in setting forth the following body of
considerations he tells the story of his own disillusionment. At the
outset he took for granted--and, very naturally, he wishes to imagine
that a great number of other people do also take for granted--that the
future of London, for example, is largely to be got as the answer to a
sort of rule-of-three sum. If in one hundred years the population of
London has been multiplied by seven, then in two hundred years--! And
one proceeds to pack the answer in gigantic tenement houses, looming
upon colossal roofed streets, provide it with moving ways (the only
available transit appliances suited to such dense multitudes), and
develop its manners and morals in accordance with the laws that will
always prevail amidst over-crowded humanity so long as humanity endures.
The picture of this swarming concentrated humanity has some effective
possibilities, but, unhappily, if, instead of that obvious rule-of-three
sum, one resorts to an analysis of operating causes, its plausibility
crumbles away, and it gives place to an altogether different forecast--a
forecast, indeed, that is in a