Legal restrictions upon unhealthy and dangerous employments, shorter working hours, adequate inspection, the stimulus given by such measures to a more rapid application of highly-developed machinery, may succeed in reducing considerably the physical evils directly arising from town industries. But the town will still remain a more unhealthy place to live in than the country, and as on the one hand the fundamental and paramount importance of a healthy physical environment receives fuller recognition, and on the other hand larger leisure and opportunities of enjoyment and development make life more valuable to the mass of the workers than it is at present, the pressure of this problem of town life will grow apace.
§ 6. (B) That town life, as distinguished from town work, is educative of certain intellectual and moral qualities, is evident. Setting aside that picked intelligence which flows to the town to compete successfully for intellectual employment, there can be no question but that the townsman has a larger superficial knowledge of the world and human nature. He is shrewd, alert, versatile, quicker, and more resourceful than the countryman. In thought, speech, action, this superiority shows itself. The townsman has a more developed consciousness, his intelligence is constantly stimulated in a thousand ways by larger and more varied society, and by a more diversified and complex economic environment. While there is reason to believe that town work is on the average less educative than country work, town life more than turns the scale. The social intercourse of the club, the trade society, the church, the home, the public-house, the music-hall, the street, supply innumerable educative influences, to say nothing of the ampler opportunities of consciously organised intellectual education which are available in large towns. If, however, we examine a little deeper the character of town education and intelligence certain tolerably definite limitations show themselves. School instruction, slightly more advanced than in the country, is commonly utilised to sharpen industrial competition, and to feed that sensational interest in sport and crime which absorbs the attention of the masses in their non-working hours; it seldom forms the foundation of an intellectual life in which knowledge and taste are reckoned in themselves desirable. The power to read and write is employed by the great majority of all classes in ways which evoke a minimum of thought and wholesome feeling. Social, political, and religious prejudices are made to do the work which should be done by careful thought and scientific investigation.
Scattered and unrelated fragments of half-baked information form a stock of "knowledge" with which the townsman's glib tongue enables him to present a showy intellectual shop-front. Business smartness pays better in the town, and the low intellectual qualities which are contained in it are educated by town life. The knowledge of human nature thus evoked is in no sense science, it is a mere rule-of-thumb affair, a thin mechanical empiricism. The capable business man who is said to understand the "world" and his fellow-men, has commonly no knowledge of human nature in the larger sense, but merely knows from observation how the average man of a certain limited class is likely to act within a narrow prescribed sphere of self-seeking. Town life, then, strongly favours the education of certain shallow forms of intelligence. In actual attainment the townsman is somewhat more advanced than the countryman. But the deterioration of physique which accompanies this gain causes a weakening of mental fibre: the potentiality of intellectual development and work which the countryman brings with him on his entry to town life is thwarted and depressed by the progressive physical enfeeblement. Most of the best and strongest intellectual work done in the towns is done by immigrants, not by town-bred folk.
§ 7. (C) This intellectual weakness of town life is best expressed in terms which show the intimate relation between intelligence and morals. A lack of "grit," pertinacity of purpose, endurance, "character," marks the townsman of the second generation as compared with the countryman. As the intellectual powers of the townsman, though quantitatively impaired, are more highly developed than those of the countryman, so it is with his "morals." In positive attainments of conscience, virtue, and vice, the townsman shows considerable advance. This point is commonly misunderstood. The annals of crime afford irrefutable evidence of the greater criminality of the towns. London, containing less than one-fifth of the population of England and Wales, is responsible for more than one-third of the annual number of indictable crimes.[284] In France the criminality of the urban population is just double that of the rural population.[285] In 1884-86, out of each 100,000 city population sixteen were charged with crimes; out of each 100,000 rural population only eight. It is indeed commonly recognised in criminology that, other things being equal, crime varies with the density of population. There is no difficulty in understanding why this should be so. The pressure of population and the concentration of property afford to the evil-disposed individual an increased number of temptations to invade the person or property of others; for many sorts of crime the conditions of town life afford greater security to the criminal; social and industrial causes create a large degenerate class not easily amenable to social control, incapable of getting regular work to do, or of doing it if they could get it.
If the town were a social organism formed by men desirous of living together for mutual support, comfort, and enjoyment in their lives, it might reasonably be expected that a wholesome public feeling would be so strongly operative as to outweigh the increased opportunities of crime. But, as we have seen, the modern town is a result of the desire to produce and distribute most economically the largest aggregate of material goods: economy of work, not convenience of life, is the object. Now, the economy of factory co-operation is only social to a very limited extent; anti-social feelings are touched and stimulated at every point by the competition of workers with one another, the antagonism between employers and employed, between sellers and buyers, factory and factory, shop and shop.
Perhaps the most potent influence in breaking the strength of the morale of the town worker is the precarious and disorderly character of town work. That element of monotonous order, which we found excessive in the education afforded by the individual machine to the machine-tender, is balanced by a corresponding defect in machine-industry taken as a whole. Town work, as we have seen, is more irregular than country work, and this irregularity has a most pernicious effect upon the character of the worker. Professor Foxwell has thus strikingly expressed the moral influences of this economic factor: "When employment is precarious, thrift and self-reliance are discouraged. The savings of years may be swallowed up in a few months. A fatalistic spirit is developed. Where all is uncertain and there is not much to lose, reckless overpopulation is certain to be set at. These effects are not confined to the poorer classes. The business world is equally demoralised by industrial speculation, careful prevision cannot reckon upon receiving its due return, and speculation of the purest gambling type is thereby encouraged. But the working class suffers most."[286]
The town as an industrial structure is at present inadequate to supply a social education which shall be strong enough to defeat the tendencies to anti-social conduct which are liable to take shape in criminal action. The intellectual training given by town life does not, as we have seen, assist in stimulating higher intellectual and moral interests whose satisfaction lies above the plane of material desire. There is indeed some evidence that the meagre and wholly rudimentary education given to our town-dwellers is, by reason of its inadequacy, a direct feeder of town vices. The lower forms of music-hall entertainment, the dominant popular vice of gambling, the more degraded kinds of printed matter, owe their existence and their financial success to a public policy which has confined the education of the people to the three R's, making it generally impossible, always difficult, for them to obtain such intellectual training as shall implant higher intellectual interests with whose pursuit they may occupy their leisure. But, in taking count of the criminality and vice of large towns 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.
§ 8. But powerful as these centralising forces have been during the last century and a half, we are not justified in assuming that they will continue to operate with gathering momentum in the future, and that the results which are assigned to them will increase in magnitude. Such an assumption would ignore two groups of counteracting forces which are beginning to manifest themselves in the more advanced industrial communities.
The first of these groups consists of a number of directly counteracting or decentralising forces.