There are changes other than those of industrial method which help the townward movement. The spirit of curiosity and enterprise stimulated by education and the newspaper press, a desire for freer and more varied social intercourse, a love of sensation and amusement, a seeking after culture and intellectual development, in some cases the mere promptings of idleness, discontent, or even criminal desires, drive an increasing proportion of the younger rural population towards the towns. But it is the combination of industrial changes in which machinery plays the central part--the increased application of machinery to agriculture reducing the demand for agricultural labour, the development of manufacturing industries in towns, the labour of transport and distribution requiring centralised machinery--that makes this movement physically and economically feasible. The shift in the proportionate demand for labour in towns and in country attributable to machine-production is a principal direct agent in the movement. § 2. In England, _par excellence_ the manufacturing country, the growth of the town as compared with the country is strongly marked during the last thirty years. 1861. 1871. 1881. 1891. Urban Population[267] 62.3 64.8 66.6 71.7 Rural " 37.7 35.2 33.4 28.3 During the decennium 1881-91 there was a considerable check in the immigration from the country into the large towns, though the proportion of townsfolk to country folk grew even more rapidly than in the preceding ten years.[268] In Holland and Belgium, notwithstanding a large migration to foreign lands, the towns grow far quicker than the total population. Thus in Holland in the period 1870-79 the towns increased 17.25, while the rural districts only increased 6.8. In Belgium, where the emigration across the border is still larger, there is a tide of migration of the parochial or country population continually setting towards Antwerp, Brussels, and Liege.[269] [Illustration: GROWTH OF FRENCH POPULATION.]