§ 3. These facts and figures do not, however, of themselves justify the conclusion that a larger proportion of the world's population is moving into towns. In all the advanced industrial countries a smaller proportion of the population is engaged in those extractive and domestic industries which belong to rural life, a larger proportion in the manufacturing and distributive industries which belong to towns. But this movement is made possible by the fact that an increasing proportion of the food and the raw materials of manufacture used in these countries is drawn from the labour of the more backward countries. The increase of the area of the industrial world is effecting such a division of labour as hands over an ever-increasing proportion of the agricultural work to the inhabitants of those countries which do not rank as civilised industrial countries. The known growth of certain large trading centres in India, China, Egypt, South Africa, etc., does not justify us, in the absence of careful statistical inquiry, in assuming that an increased proportion of the inhabitants of these and other more backward portions of the globe is passing into town life. Unless agricultural machinery and improved agricultural methods are advancing more rapidly in these great "growing areas" than we have a right to suppose, it would seem that there must be some increased demand for agricultural and other rural labour which shall, partially, at any rate, compensate for the diminished demand for such kinds of labour in the more advanced industrial communities. For although a large number of the industries subsidiary to agriculture, the making of tools, waggons, gates, fencing, etc., have now passed from the country to the towns, while the economies of machinery and improved cultivation have advanced so far that it is alleged that three men working on soil of average quality can raise food for one thousand, still the growth of population with a constantly rising standard of material consumption seems likely to prevent any net diminution in the proportion of labour engaged upon the soil in the industrial world. So long as modern methods of production and consumption in civilised countries require an ever-increasing quantity of raw materials, it would seem _à priori_ unlikely that a smaller proportion of the whole industry of the world should be devoted to agricultural and other extractive industries, and a larger amount to the manufacturing and distributive industries, where the chief economies of machine-production are so largely applied. Since this growth of town population is quicker in the advanced industrial communities, slower in the less advanced, so it may well be the case that, in the countries which are but slightly and indirectly affected by modern industry, it does not exist at all. There exist, however, no satisfactory data upon which a judgment may be formed upon this point.