The biggest, and in some respects the most characteristic of machine-products is the modern industrial town. Steam-power is in a most literal sense the maker of the modern town. When the motive-power of industrial work was chiefly confined to the forces stored in man, the economy obtained by collecting larger numbers of men to work in close proximity to one another was comparatively small, and was commonly outweighed by the difficulty of securing for them a sufficient supply of food and other commodities, and by the greater immobility of labour at a time when fixed local associations were a strong binding force, and transport was slow and expensive. When the earlier machinery drew its motive-power chiefly from water, the local attachment and wide distribution of this power prevented the concentration of industry from advancing very far. Only in proportion as steam-power became the dominating agent did the economies of factory-production drive the workers to crowd ever more densely in the districts where coal and water for generating steam were most accessible, and to throng together for the most economical use of steam-power in industry.
This rapid appreciation of the economies of centralised production, heedless of all considerations, sanitary, æsthetic, moral, found a hasty business expression in these huge hideous conglomerations of factory buildings, warehouses, and cheap workmen's shelters, which make the modern industrial town. The requirements of a decent, healthy, harmonious individual or civic life played no appreciable part in the rapid transformation of the mediæval residential centre, or the scattered industrial village into the modern manufacturing town. Considerations of cheap profitable work were paramount; considerations of life were almost utterly ignored. So swift, heedless, anarchic has this process been, that no adequate provisions were made for securing the prime conditions of healthy, physical existence required to maintain the workers in the most profitable state of working efficiency. Only of recent years in a few of the larger manufacturing towns has some slow revival of the idea of civic life, as distinct from the organised manipulation of municipal affairs for selfish business purposes, begun to manifest itself. The typical modern town is still a place of workshops, not of homes.
Transport-machinery, the railway and the steamship, have been almost as important factors in the making of towns as manufacturing-machinery. By easily, quickly, and cheaply bringing food from a distance, they make town work and town life upon a large scale possible; by imparting increased fluidity to capital and labour, they continually increase the economic advantages of highly concentrated industry. In the opening up of new countries like the United States and Australia, the railway is the literal maker of the town, in older countries it is the chief alimental channel.
The pace at which this concentration of population in large towns proceeds is the most serviceable measurement of the progress which the various parts of the industrial world are making in machine-industry.
There are changes other than those of industrial method which help the townward movement. The spirit of curiosity and enterprise stimulated by education and the newspaper press, a desire for freer and more varied social intercourse, a love of sensation and amusement, a seeking after culture and intellectual development, in some cases the mere promptings of idleness, discontent, or even criminal desires, drive an increasing proportion of the younger rural population towards the towns. But it is the combination of industrial changes in which machinery plays the central part—the increased application of machinery to agriculture reducing the demand for agricultural labour, the development of manufacturing industries in towns, the labour of transport and distribution requiring centralised machinery—that makes this movement physically and economically feasible. The shift in the proportionate demand for labour in towns and in country attributable to machine-production is a principal direct agent in the movement.
§ 2. In England, par excellence the manufacturing country, the growth of the town as compared with the country is strongly marked during the last thirty years.
| 1861. | 1871. | 1881. | 1891. | |
| Urban Population[267] | 62.3 | 64.8 | 66.6 | 71.7 |
| Rural Population | 37.7 | 35.2 | 33.4 | 28.3 |
During the decennium 1881-91 there was a considerable check in the immigration from the country into the large towns, though the proportion of townsfolk to country folk grew even more rapidly than in the preceding ten years.[268]
In Holland and Belgium, notwithstanding a large migration to foreign lands, the towns grow far quicker than the total population. Thus in Holland in the period 1870-79 the towns increased 17.25, while the rural districts only increased 6.8. In Belgium, where the emigration across the border is still larger, there is a tide of migration of the parochial or country population continually setting towards Antwerp, Brussels, and Liege.[269]
