d and stimulated
at every point by the competition of workers with one another, the
antagonism between employers and employed, between sellers and buyers,
factory and factory, shop and shop.

Perhaps the most potent influence in breaking the strength of the
_morale_ of the town worker is the precarious and disorderly
character of town work. That element of monotonous order, which we
found excessive in the education afforded by the individual machine to
the machine-tender, is balanced by a corresponding defect in
machine-industry taken as a whole. Town work, as we have seen, is more
irregular than country work, and this irregularity has a most
pernicious effect upon the character of the worker. Professor Foxwell
has thus strikingly expressed the moral influences of this economic
factor: "When employment is precarious, thrift and self-reliance are
discouraged. The savings of years may be swallowed up in a few months.
A fatalistic spirit is developed. Where all is uncertain and there is
not much to lose, reckless overpopulation is certain to be set at.
These effects are not confined to the poorer classes. The business
world is equally demoralised by industrial speculation, careful
prevision cannot reckon upon receiving its due return, and speculation
of the purest gambling type is thereby encouraged. But the working
class suffers most."[286]

The town as an industrial structure is at present inadequate to supply
a social education which shall be strong enough to defeat the
tendencies to anti-social conduct which are liable to take shape in
criminal action. The intellectual training given by town life does
not, as we have seen, assist in stimulating higher intellectual and
moral interests whose satisfaction lies above the plane of material
desire. There is indeed some evidence that the meagre and wholly
rudimentary education given to our town-dwellers is, by reason of its
inadequacy, a direct feeder of town vices. The lower forms of
music-hall entertainment, the dominant popular vice of gambling, the
more degraded kinds of printed matter, owe their existence and their
financial success to a public policy which has confined the education
of the people to the three R's, making it generally impossible, always
difficult, for them to obtain such intellectual training as shall
implant higher intellectual interests with whose pursuit they may
occupy their leisure. But, in taking count of the criminality and vice
of large towns