uired to maintain the workers in the most profitable
state of working efficiency. Only of recent years in a few of the
larger manufacturing towns has some slow revival of the idea of civic
life, as distinct from the organised manipulation of municipal affairs
for selfish business purposes, begun to manifest itself. The typical
modern town is still a place of workshops, not of homes.

Transport-machinery, the railway and the steamship, have been almost as
important factors in the making of towns as manufacturing-machinery. By
easily, quickly, and cheaply bringing food from a distance, they make
town work and town life upon a large scale possible; by imparting
increased fluidity to capital and labour, they continually increase the
economic advantages of highly concentrated industry. In the opening up
of new countries like the United States and Australia, the railway is
the literal maker of the town, in older countries it is the chief
alimental channel.

The pace at which this concentration of population in large towns
proceeds is the most serviceable measurement of the progress which the
various parts of the industrial world are making in machine-industry.

There are changes other than those of industrial method which help the
townward movement. The spirit of curiosity and enterprise stimulated
by education and the newspaper press, a desire for freer and more
varied social intercourse, a love of sensation and amusement, a
seeking after culture and intellectual development, in some cases the
mere promptings of idleness, discontent, or even criminal desires,
drive an increasing proportion of the younger rural population towards
the towns. But it is the combination of industrial changes in which
machinery plays the central part--the increased application of
machinery to agriculture reducing the demand for agricultural labour,
the development of manufacturing industries in towns, the labour of
transport and distribution requiring centralised machinery--that makes
this movement physically and economically feasible. The shift in the
proportionate demand for labour in towns and in country attributable
to machine-production is a principal direct agent in the movement.

Sec. 2. In England, _par excellence_ the manufacturing country, the
growth of the town as compared with the country is strongly marked
during the last thirty years.

1861. 1871. 1881. 1891.

Urban Population[267] 62.3 64.8