An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary MattersWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Great Britain -- Social conditions; Social problems; United States -- Social conditions
Already one can note remarkable developments of migration. There is, for
example, that flow to and fro across the Atlantic of labourers from the
Mediterranean. Italian workmen by the hundred thousand go to the United
States in the spring and return in the autumn. Again, there is a stream
of thousands of prosperous Americans to summer in Europe. Compared with
any European country, the whole population of the United States is
fluid. Equally notable is the enormous proportion of the British
prosperous which winters either in the high Alps or along the Riviera.
England is rapidly developing the former Irish grievance of an absentee
propertied class. It is only now by the most strenuous artificial
banking back that migrations on a far huger scale from India into
Africa, and from China and Japan into Australia and America are
prevented.
All the indications point to a time when it will be an altogether
exceptional thing for a man to follow one occupation in one place all
his life, and still rarer for a son to follow in his father's footsteps
or die in his father's house.
The thing is as simple as the rule of three. We are off the chain of
locality for good and all. It was necessary heretofore for a man to live
in immediate contact with his occupation, because the only way for him
to reach it was to have it at his door, and the cost and delay of
transport were relatively too enormous for him to shift once he was
settled. _Now_ he may live twenty or thirty miles away from his
occupation; and it often pays him to spend the small amount of time and
money needed to move--it may be half-way round the world--to healthier
conditions or more profitable employment.
And with every diminution in the cost and duration of transport it
becomes more and more possible, and more and more likely, to be
profitable to move great multitudes of workers seasonally between
regions where work is needed in this season and regions where work is
needed in that. They can go out to the agricultural lands at one time
and come back into towns for artistic work and organised work in
factories at another. They can move from rain and darkness into
sunshine, and from heat into the coolness of mountain forests. Children
can be sent for education to sea beaches and healthy mountains.
Men will harvest in Saskatchewan and come down in great liners to spend
the winter working in the forests of Yucatan.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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