Crowded trams and trains, with desperate men and weak women fighting a daily battle for conveyance before all the cheap trips have been made, inflict a shameful degradation upon the class for which Parliament makes illusory provision in railway and tramway Acts. As a consequence of this difficulty, and also because of the early hour at which the companies are allowed to cease carrying working-folk at the workmen's fare, many men and women are compelled to waste some hours of their scanty leisure every day between the arrival of their trains and the opening of their workshops, a cruelty for which the blame may be pretty equally apportioned to Parliament and the company directors. The result of it is that many of the poor prefer the evil of overcrowding in cities before the greater evil of wasted time and degrading travel. As time goes on, no doubt the monopolists of transportation will be compelled, as their own necessities increase and so bring them under the hand of the legislature, to serve more adequately the necessities of the majority. But even so, and as long as the effective speed of conveyance is limited by the lack of permanent-way space and the necessity for frequent stations, the impatience even now manifested, and manifested chiefly by the class which suffers least from loss of time in travel, will lead to concentration. Taking London as an example, it may be said that the Victorian age was the age of the suburbs. But few people now live in the suburbs of London who can afford to live anywhere else. Either they move right out into the country, seeking a spot on some main line where the greater distance and less-frequent train service is made up for by speedy and uninterrupted journeys; or they come into London and occupy houses or flats within easy reach of their working head-quarters. The suburbs are given over to those who cannot afford either of these expedients, or who, having been brought up there, are retained by a sort of inertia. Ultimately, as the demand for town space becomes intensified, two things will happen. First of all, the restrictions which many cities, ignoring the freedom of New York and Chicago, impose upon the erection of excessively high buildings, will go by the board. The shutting out of sunlight and fresh air will be the subject of compensations to be presently explained, and thirty, forty, fifty or a hundred-storey houses, and houses which perhaps burrow to some distance underground, will, by virtue of the same compensations, house a vast, concentrated population impatient of daily travel. As the demand for homes increases, and even the high buildings cannot cope with it, the cities will push their way outwards, repopulating the rebuilt suburbs. This kind of thing will have a tendency to correct itself. Rents will be high in proportion to position near the centre. But a limit of toleration will be reached, and as certain improvements will have been effected in transport,