Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
This is a double change. Let me first of all say a word in justification
for my first assertion that existing areas do not represent communities,
and then pass to a necessary consequence or so of this fact. I submit
that before the railways, that is to say in the days in which the
current conception of local government areas arose, the villages,
and still more the boroughs, and even the counties, were practically
complete minor economic systems. The wealth of the locality was, roughly
speaking, local; rich people resided in contact with their property,
other people lived in contact with their work, and it was a legitimate
assumption that a radius of a mile or so, or of a few miles,
circumscribed most of the practical interests of all the inhabitants
of a locality. You got rich and poor in visible relationships; you got
landlord and tenant, you got master and workman all together. But now,
through a revolution in the methods of locomotion, and chiefly through
the making of railways, this is no longer true. You can still see
the villages and towns separated by spaces of fields and physically
distinct, but it is no longer the case that all who dwell in these old
limits are essentially local inhabitants and mutually interdependent as
once they would have been. A large proportion of our population to-day,
a large and an increasing proportion, has no localized interests at all
as an eighteenth-century person would have understood locality.
Take for example Guildford, or Folkestone, and you will find that
possibly even more than half the wealth in the place is non-local
wealth--wealth, that is, having no relation to the local production of
wealth--and that a large majority of the more educated, intelligent and
active inhabitants derive their income, spend their energies, and find
their absorbing interests outside the locality. They may rent or own
houses, but they have no reality of participation and little illusion
of participation in any local life. You will find in both towns a
considerable number of hotels, inns, and refreshment places which,
although they are regulated by local magistrates upon a basis of one
license to so many inhabitants, derive only a small fraction of their
profits from the custom of the inhabitants. You find too in Folkestone,
as in most seaside places, a great number of secondary schools, drawing
scarcely a pupil from the neighbourhood. And on the other hand you will
find labour in both towns, coming in by a morning train and going out at
night. And neither of these instances is an extreme type. As you come
in towards London you will find the proportion of what I would call
non-local inhabitants increasing until in Brixton, Hoxton, or West Ham
you will find the really localized people a mere thread in the mass of
the population. Probably you find the thinnest sham of a community
in the London boroughs, where a clerk or a working man will shift his
sticks from one borough to another and move on to a third without ever
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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