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II--THE VACANT COUNTRY
The world, they say, changed more between the year 1800 and the year
1
900 than it had done in the previous five hundred years. That century,
the nineteenth century, was the dawn of a new epoch in the history of
mankind--the epoch of the great cities, the end of the old order of
country life.
In the beginning of the nineteenth century the majority of mankind still
lived upon the countryside, as their way of life had been for countless
generations. All over the world they dwelt in little towns and villages
then, and engaged either directly in agriculture, or in occupations that
were of service to the agriculturist. They travelled rarely, and dwelt
close to their work, because swift means of transit had not yet come.
The few who travelled went either on foot, or in slow sailing-ships, or
by means of jogging horses incapable of more than sixty miles a day.
Think of it!--sixty miles a day. Here and there, in those sluggish
times, a town grew a little larger than its neighbours, as a port or as
a centre of government; but all the towns in the world with more than a
hundred thousand inhabitants could be counted on a man's fingers. So it
was in the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the end, the
invention of railways, telegraphs, steamships, and complex agricultural
machinery, had changed all these things: changed them beyond all hope of
return. The vast shops, the varied pleasures, the countless conveniences
of the larger towns were suddenly possible, and no sooner existed than
they were brought into competition with the homely resources of the
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