Graham had already learnt, and which he found very hard to
imagine, was that nearly all the towns in the country, and almost all the
villages, had disappeared. Here and there only, he understood, some
gigantic hotel-like edifice stood amid square miles of some single
cultivation and preserved the name of a town--as Bournemouth, Wareham, or
Swanage. Yet the officer had speedily convinced him how inevitable such a
change had been. The old order had dotted the country with farmhouses,
and every two or three miles was the ruling landlord's estate, and the
place of the inn and cobbler, the grocer's shop and church--the village.
Every eight miles or so was the country town, where lawyer, corn
merchant, wool-stapler, saddler, veterinary surgeon, doctor, draper,
milliner and so forth lived. Every eight miles--simply because that eight
mile marketing journey, four there and back, was as much as was
comfortable for the farmer. But directly the railways came into play, and
after them the light railways, and all the swift new motor cars that had
replaced waggons and horses, and so soon as the high roads began to be
made of wood, and rubber, and Eadhamite, and all sorts of elastic durable
substances--the necessity of having such frequent market towns
disappeared. And the big towns grew. They drew the worker with the
gravitational force of seemingly endless work, the employer with their
suggestion of an infinite ocean of labour.

And as the standard of comfort rose, as the complexity of the mechanism
of living increased, life in the country had become more and more costly,
or narrow and impossible. The disappearance of vicar and squire, the
extinction of the general practitioner by the city specialist; had robbed
the village of its last touch of culture. After telephone, kinematograph
and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book, schoolmaster, and letter, to
live outside the range of the electric cables was to live an isolated
savage. In the country were neither means of being clothed nor fed
(according to the refined conceptions of the time), no efficient doctors
for an emergency, no company and no pursuits.

Moreover, mechanical appliances in agriculture made one engineer the
equivalent of thirty labourers. So, inverting the condition of the city
clerk in the days when London was scarce inhabitable because of the coaly
foulness of its air, the labourers now came to the city and its life and
delights at night to leave it again in the