r.

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 hurrying by road or
air to the city and its life and delights at night to leave it again in
the morning. The city had swallowed up humanity; man had entered upon a
new stage in his development. First had come the nomad, the hunter, then
had followed the agriculturist of the agricultural state, whose towns
and cities and ports were but the headquarters and markets of the
countryside. And now, logical consequence of an epoch of invention,
was this huge new aggregation of men. Save London, there were only
four other cities in Britain--Edinburgh, Portsmouth, Manchester and
Shrewsbury. Such things as these, simple statements of fact though they
were to contemporary men, strained Graham's imagination to picture. And
when he glanced "over beyond there" at the strange things that existed
on the Continent, it failed him altogether.

He had a vision of city beyond city, cities on great plains, cities
beside great rivers, vast cities along the sea margin, cities girdled by
snowy mountains. Over a great part of the earth the English tongue was
spoken; taken together with its Spanish American and Hindoo and Negro
and "Pidgin" dialects, it was the everyday language of two-thirds of
the people of the earth. On the Continent, save as remote and curious
survivals, three other languages alone held sway--German, which reached
to Antioch and Genoa and jostled Spanish-English at Gdiz, a Gallicised
Russian which met the Indian English in Persia and Kurdistan and the
"Pidgin" English in Pekin, and French