it is not just to ignore a certain counter-claim which
might be made. If our annals of virtue were kept as carefully as our
annals of vice, we might find that town life stood higher in the one
than in the other. There are more opportunities to display positive
goodness and positive badness in the town; life is more crowded and
more rapid, and it is likely that acts of kindness, generosity,
self-denial, even of heroic self-sacrifice, are more numerous in the
town than in the country. The average townsman is more developed
morally as well as intellectually for good and for evil. That the good
does not more signally predominate is in no small measure due to the
feeble social environment. Public opinion is generally a little in
advance of the average morality of the individuals who compose the
public. Here is a mighty lever for raising the masses. But where the
density of population is determined by industrial competition, rather
than by human-social causes, it would seem that the force of sound
public opinion is in inverse proportion to the density of population,
being weakest in the most crowded cities. In spite of the machinery of
political, religious, social, trade organisations in large towns, it
is probable that the true spiritual cohesiveness between individual
members is feebler than in any other form of society. If it is true
that as the larger village grows into the town, and the town into the
ever larger city, there is a progressive weakening of the bonds of
moral cohesion between individuals, that the larger the town the
feebler the spiritual unity, we are face to face with the heaviest
indictment that can be brought against modern industrial progress, and
the forces driving an increased proportion of our population into
towns are bringing about a decadence of _morale_ which is the
necessary counterpart of the deterioration of national physique.

So far as we are justified in regarding the modern town and the
tendency to increased town life as results of machinery and industrial
evolution, there can be little doubt of the validity of these
accusations. The free play of economic forces under the guidance of
the selfish instincts of commercial individuals, or groups of
individuals, is driving an increased proportion of the population of
civilised countries into a town life which is injurious to physical
and moral health, and provides no security for the attainment of an
intellectual life which is worth living.