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 change in human conditions that has been a very distinctive
event in the history of the past century, and it is still in progress.
But I think there is excellent reason for supposing that for practical
purposes this change, made by the railway and the motor, this
development of local locomotion, will reach a definite limit in the next
hundred years. We are witnessing the completion of a great development
that has altered the average possible suburban journey in an hour from
one of four or five miles to one of thirty miles, and I doubt very much
whether, when every tendency of expansion has been reckoned with, this
average hour journey will ever get much beyond sixty or seventy miles an
hour. A radius of four or five miles marked the maximum size of the old
community. A radius of a hundred miles will certainly mark the maximum
of the new community. And so it is no effectual answer to my general
argument to say that a revision of administrative areas always has been
and always will be a public necessity. To a certain extent that always
has been and always will be true, but on a scale in no way comparable
to the scale on which it is true to-day, because of these particular
inventions. This need in its greatness is a peculiar feature of the
present time, and a peculiar problem of the present time. The municipal
areas that were convenient in the Babylonian, ancient Egyptian, or Roman
empires were no larger and no smaller than those that served the purpose
of seventeenth-century Europe, and I believe it is highly probable--I
think the odds are in favour of the belief--that the most convenient
administrative areas of the year 2000 will be no larger and no smaller
than those for many subsequent centuries. We are, in this respect, in
the full flow of a great and permanent transition. And the social and
political aspect of the change, is this steadily increasing proportion
of people--more especially in our suburban areas--who are, so far as our
old divisions go, delocalized. They represent, in fact, a community of a
new sort, the new great modern community, which is seeking to
establish itself in the room of the dwindling, little, highly localized
communities of the past.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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