HKB
the several trades and in the individual businesses within the trade is a first requisite to the establishment of a fixed healthy home for the industrial worker and his family.
Sec. 11. It is, however, unlikely that any wide or lasting solution of the problem of congested town life will be found in a sharp local severance of the life of an industrial society which shall abandon the town to the purposes of a huge workshop, reserving the country for habitation. The true unity of individual and social life forbids this abrupt cleavage between the arts of production and consumption, between the man and his work. It is only in the case of the largest and densest industrial cities, swollen to an unwieldy and dangerous size, that such methods of decentralisation can in some measure be applied. In these monstrous growths machinery of decentralisation may be evoked to undo in part at any rate the work of centralising machinery. In smaller towns, where the circumference bears a larger proportion to the mass, a spreading of the close-packed population over an expanded town-area will be more feasible, and will form the first step in that series of reforms which shall humanise the industrial town. The congestion of the poorer population of our towns, and the struggle for fresh air and elbow-room which it implies, is the most formidable barrier to the work of transforming the town from a big workshop into a human dwelling-place, with an individual life, a character, a soul of its own. The true reform policy is not to destroy the industrial town but to breathe into it the breath of social life, to temper and subordinate its industrial machine-goods-producing character to the higher and more complex purposes of social life. An ample, far-sighted, enlightened, social control over the whole area of city ground, whether used for dwellings or for industrial purposes, is the first condition of the true municipal life. The industrial town, left for its growth to individual industrial control, compresses into unhealthily close proximity large numbers of persons drawn together from different quarters of the earth, with different and often antagonistic aims, with little knowledge of one another, with no important common end to form a bond of social sympathy. The town presents the single raw material of local proximity out of which municipal life is to be built. The first business of the municipal reformer then is to transform this excessive proximity into wholesome neighbourhood, in order that true neighbourly feelings may have room to grow and thrive, and eventually to ripen into the flower of a fair civic life. "A modern city," it has been well said, "is probably the most impersonal combination of individuals that has ever been formed in the world's history."[288] To evoke the personal human qualities of this medley of city workers so as to reach within the individual the citizen, to educate the civic feeling until it take shape in civic activities and institutions, which shall not only safeguard the public welfare against the encroachments of private industrial greed, but shall find an ever ampler and nobler expression in the aesthetic beauty and spiritual dignity of a complex, common life--all this work of transformation lies in front of the democracy, grouped in its ever-increasing number of town-units.
FOOTNOTES:
[267] According to Arthur Young, in 1770 half the population was already urban. But though the townward drift, owing in large measure to the land-hunger of the aristocracy and wealthy merchant class, and the labour-saving economy of large farming, was clearly visible before the development of machine-industry, it is probable that Young's estimate goes beyond the facts.
[268] Mr. Cannan points out that this is due on the one hand to the healthier conditions of the towns whose natural increase is larger; on the other hand, to an increased migration from the rural parts to foreign countries. ("The Decline of Urban Immigration," National Review, January 1894.)
[269] Ravenstein, Statistical Journal, June 1889.
[270] Preliminary Report (c. 6422), p. 23.