I am told, long since
ceased. And the withdrawing publishers may very well take with them the
printers and binders, and attract about them their illustrators and
designers.... So, as a typical instance, one--now urban--trade may
detach itself.

Publishing is, however, only one of the many similar trades equally
profitable and equally likely to move outward to secondary centres, with
the development and cheapening of transit. It is all a question of
transit. Limitation of transit contracts the city, facilitation expands
and disperses it. All this case for diffusion so far is built up
entirely on the hypothesis we attempted to establish in the first paper,
that transit of persons and goods alike is to become easier, swifter,
and altogether better organized than it is at present.

The telephone will almost certainly prove a very potent auxiliary indeed
to the forces making for diffusion. At present that convenience is still
needlessly expensive in Great Britain, and a scandalously stupid
business conflict between telephone company and post-office delays,
complicates, and makes costly and exasperating all trunk communications;
but even under these disadvantages the thing is becoming a factor in the
life of ordinary villadom. Consider all that lies within its
possibilities. Take first the domestic and social side; almost all the
labour of ordinary shopping can be avoided--goods nowadays can be
ordered and sent either as sold outright, or on approval, to any place
within a hundred miles of London, and in one day they can be examined,
discussed, and returned--at any rate, in theory. The mistress of the
house has all her local tradesmen, all the great London shops, the
circulating library, the theatre box-office, the post-office and
cab-rank, the nurses' institute and the doctor, within reach of her
hand. The instrument we may confidently expect to improve, but even now
speech is perfectly clear and distinct over several hundred miles of
wire. Appointments and invitations can be made; and at a cost varying
from a penny to two shillings any one within two hundred miles of home
may speak day or night into the ear of his or her household. Were it not
for that unmitigated public nuisance, the practical control of our
post-office by non-dismissable Civil servants, appointed so young as to
be entirely ignorant of the unofficial world, it would be possible now
to send urgent messages at any hour of the day or night to any part of
t