he world; and even our sacred institution of the Civil Service can
scarcely prevent this desirable consummation for many years more. The
business man may then sit at home in his library and bargain, discuss,
promise, hint, threaten, tell such lies as he dare not write, and, in
fact, do everything that once demanded a personal encounter. Already for
a great number of businesses it is no longer necessary that the office
should be in London, and only habit, tradition, and minor considerations
keep it there. With the steady cheapening and the steady increase in
efficiency of postal and telephonic facilities, and of goods transit, it
seems only reasonable to anticipate the need for that expensive office
and the irksome daily journey will steadily decline. In other words,
what will still be economically the "city," as distinguished from the
"agricultural" population, will probably be free to extend, in the case
of all the prosperous classes not tied to large establishments in need
of personal supervision, far beyond the extreme limits of the daily hour
journey.

But the diffusion of the prosperous, independent, and managing classes
involves in itself a very considerable diffusion of the purely "working"
classes also. Their centres of occupation will be distributed, and their
freedom to live at some little distance from their work will be
increased. Whether this will mean dotting the country with dull, ugly
little streets, slum villages like Buckfastleigh in Devon, for example,
or whether it may result in entirely different and novel aspects, is a
point for which at present we are not ready. But it bears upon the
question that ugliness and squalor upon the main road will appeal to the
more prosperous for remedy with far more vigour than when they are
stowed compactly in a slum.

Enough has been said to demonstrate that old "town" and "city" will be,
in truth, terms as obsolete as "mail coach." For these new areas that
will grow out of them we want a term, and the administrative "urban
district" presents itself with a convenient air of suggestion. We may
for our present purposes call these coming town provinces "urban
regions." Practically, by a process of confluence, the whole of Great
Britain south of the Highlands seems destined to become such an urban
region, laced all together not only by railway and telegraph, but by
novel roads such as we forecast in the former chapter, and by a dense
network of telephones, parcels deli