s
further North and West, the per-centage gradually though not quite
regularly declines. The numbers from Durham and Northumberland on the
one hand, and from Devon and Somerset on the other are much larger than
those from certain nearer counties, such as Stafford, Yorkshire, and
Lancaster. The chief determinate of the force of attraction, distance
from the centre, is in these cases qualified by two other
considerations. In the case of Durham and Northumberland a large
navigable seaboard affords greater facility and cheapness of transport,
an important factor in the mobility of labour. In the case of Devon and
Somerset the absence of the counter-attraction of large provincial
cities drives almost the whole of its migratory folk to London, whereas
in Yorkshire and Lancashire and the chief Midland manufacturing counties
the attraction of their own industrial centres acts more powerfully in
their immediate neighbourhood than the magic of London itself. Thus, if
we were to take the map of England and mark it so as to represent the
gravitation towards cities, we should find that every remotest village
was subject to a number of weaker or stronger, nearer or more distant,
forces, which were helping to draw off its rising population into the
eddy of city life. If we examined in detail a typical agricultural
county, we should probably find that while its one or two considerable
towns of 40,000 or 50,000 inhabitants were growing at something above
the average rate for the whole country, the smaller towns of 5000 to
10,000 were only just managing to hold their own, the smallest towns and
large villages were steadily declining, while the scattered agricultural
population remained almost stationary. For it is the small towns and the
villages that suffer most, for reasons which will shortly appear.

Sec. 3. Effects of Agricultural Depression.--We have next to ask what is
the nature of this attractive force which drains the country to feed the
city population? What has hitherto been spoken of as a single force will
be seen to be a complex of several forces, different in kind, acting
conjointly to produce the same result.

The first readily suggests itself couched under the familiar phrase,
Agricultural Depression. It is needless here to enlarge on this big and
melancholy theme. It is evident that what is called the law of
Diminishing Return to Labour in Agriculture, the fact that every
additional labourer, upon a given surface, beyon