Thus, if
we were to take the map of England and mark it so as to represent the
gravitation towards cities, we should find that every remotest village
was subject to a number of weaker or stronger, nearer or more distant,
forces, which were helping to draw off its rising population into the
eddy of city life. If we examined in detail a typical agricultural
county, we should probably find that while its one or two considerable
towns of 40,000 or 50,000 inhabitants were growing at something above
the average rate for the whole country, the smaller towns of 5000 to
10,000 were only just managing to hold their own, the smallest towns and
large villages were steadily declining, while the scattered agricultural
population remained almost stationary. For it is the small towns and the
villages that suffer most, for reasons which will shortly appear.
Sec. 3. Effects of Agricultural Depression.--We have next to ask what is
the nature of this attractive force which drains the country to feed the
city population? What has hitherto been spoken of as a single force will
be seen to be a complex of several forces, different in kind, acting
conjointly to produce the same result.
The first readily suggests itself couched under the familiar phrase,
Agricultural Depression. It is needless here to enlarge on this big and
melancholy theme. It is evident that what is called the law of
Diminishing Return to Labour in Agriculture, the fact that every
additional labourer, upon a given surface, beyond a certain sufficient
number, will be less and less profitably employed, while the indefinite
expansion of manufacture will permit every additional hand to be
utilized so as to increase the average product of each worker, would of
itself suffice to explain why in a fairly thickly populated country like
England, young labourers would find it to their interest to leave the
land and seek manufacturing work in the cities.
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