card, it will still be natural for the shops to be gathered together
in some central place. And "shopping" needs refreshment, and may
culminate in relaxation. So that Bond Street and Regent Street, the
Boulevard des Capuchins, the Corso, and Broadway will still be brilliant
and crowded for many years for all the diffusion that is here
forecast--all the more brilliant and crowded, perhaps, for the lack of a
thronging horse traffic down their central ways. But the very fact that
the old nucleus is still to be the best place for all who trade in a
concourse of people, for novelty shops and art shops, and theatres and
business buildings, by keeping up the central ground values will operate
against residence there and shift the "masses" outwardly.

And once people have been driven into cab, train, or omnibus, the only
reason why they should get out to a residence here rather than there is
the necessity of saving time, and such a violent upward gradient of
fares as will quite outbalance the downward gradient of ground values.
We have, however, already forecast a swift, varied, and inevitably
competitive suburban traffic. And so, though the centre will probably
still remain the centre and "Town," it will be essentially a bazaar, a
great gallery of shops and places of concourse and rendezvous, a
pedestrian place, its pathways reinforced by lifts and moving platforms,
and shielded from the weather, and altogether a very spacious,
brilliant, and entertaining agglomeration.

Enough now has been said to determine the general nature of the
expansion of the great cities in the future, so far as the more
prosperous classes are concerned. It will not be a regular diffusion
like the diffusion of a gas, but a process of throwing out the "homes,"
and of segregating various types of people. The omens seem to point
pretty unmistakably to a wide and quite unprecedented diversity in the
various suburban townships and suburban districts. Of that aspect of
the matter a later paper must treat. It is evident that from the outset
racial and national characteristics will tell in this diffusion. We are
getting near the end of the great Democratic, Wholesale, or Homogeneous
phase in the world's history. The sport-loving Englishman, the sociable
Frenchman, the vehement American will each diffuse his own great city in
his own way.

And now, how will the increase in the facilities of communication we
have assumed affect the condition of those whose ci