Scattered and unrelated fragments of half-baked information form a stock of "knowledge" with which the townsman's glib tongue enables him to present a showy intellectual shop-front. Business smartness pays better in the town, and the low intellectual qualities which are contained in it are educated by town life. The knowledge of human nature thus evoked is in no sense science, it is a mere rule-of-thumb affair, a thin mechanical empiricism. The capable business man who is said to understand the "world" and his fellow-men, has commonly no knowledge of human nature in the larger sense, but merely knows from observation how the average man of a certain limited class is likely to act within a narrow prescribed sphere of self-seeking. Town life, then, strongly favours the education of certain shallow forms of intelligence. In actual attainment the townsman is somewhat more advanced than the countryman. But the deterioration of physique which accompanies this gain causes a weakening of mental fibre: the potentiality of intellectual development and work which the countryman brings with him on his entry to town life is thwarted and depressed by the progressive physical enfeeblement. Most of the best and strongest intellectual work done in the towns is done by immigrants, not by town-bred folk. § 7. (_C_) This intellectual weakness of town life is best expressed in terms which show the intimate relation between intelligence and morals. A lack of "grit," pertinacity of purpose, endurance, "character," marks the townsman of the second generation as compared with the countryman. As the intellectual powers of the townsman, though quantitatively impaired, are more highly developed than those of the countryman, so it is with his "morals." In positive attainments of conscience, virtue, and vice, the townsman shows considerable advance. This point is commonly misunderstood. The annals of crime afford irrefutable evidence of the greater criminality of the towns. London, containing less than one-fifth of the population of England and Wales, is responsible for more than one-third of the annual number of indictable crimes.[284] In France the criminality of the urban population is just double that of the rural population.[285] In 1884-86, out of each 100,000 city population sixteen were charged with crimes; out of each 100,000 rural population only eight. It is indeed commonly recognised in criminology that, other things being equal, crime varies with the density of population. There is no difficulty in understanding why this should be so. The pressure of population and the concentration of property afford to the evil-disposed individual an increased number of temptations to invade the person or property of others; for many sorts of crime the conditions of town life afford greater security to the criminal; social and industrial causes create a large degenerate class not easily amenable to social control, incapable of getting regular work