In direct connection with this you have a mass of subsidiary effects, all of the highest importance to the State. The Road having caused the growth of the city, after a certain point a high differentiation arises between urban and rural life. The differentiation may become so great that you arrive at a clash of fundamental interests in which one of the two is defeated. You certainly have had that in modern England during the last two generations. The towns became so much the more important part of English life that the agricultural life was entirely sacrificed to them--and the Road was the ultimate cause. Again, you get the curious development of what may be called “reserve” towns: towns like Brighton and Blackpool, which are the playgrounds of the greater cities at a distance; the large urban centre breeds, as it were, a lesser one after its own pattern. You have got in modern times that further curious reaction due to growing excellence of communications--that is, due to the growth of the Road--the _pulse_ of the great modern city. Crowds of human beings pour out of Victoria or Liverpool Street into London and pour back from London in the evening. The station of St. Lazare in Paris is, in Europe, the most striking visual evidence of this strange modern development, great floods of human beings cascading into the city at the opening day and ebbing back at its close. At bottom, like so many other human arrangements, this “pulse” is a negation of its own principles--a sub-conscious effect which a fully thought-out plan could have avoided. There is no true economic basis for it, or, at any rate, not for the most of it. There will always be advantages, of course, in the central point, and always some tendency in men to seek that central point in order to enjoy those advantages. Ten men may desire to seek daily the central point which has only habitation-room for one, and that will lead to the “pulse” of which I speak. But the necessity for seeking it daily is already very largely an artificial necessity and is becoming more and more artificial every day. The same work can be done perfectly well at a distance as is now done in centres, and in a roundabout way that truth is impressing itself through an economic effect. The rents become so high in the crowded centre that whole groups of activities which do not really need a central position tend to disperse themselves to the outer boundaries. The printing trade, in those branches which are not hurried (the printing of books, for instance), is a good example of this. When men debate the probable future of our great cities they often omit one very likely development, which is the creation of a number of suburban centres which, if the material side of our civilization declines, will become independent towns and the probable decay of the central nucleus out of which they all grow. It is a speculation worth examining. iii