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III--THE WAYS OF THE CITY
Prominent if not paramount among world-changing inventions in the
history of man is that series of contrivances in locomotion that began
with the railway and ended for a century or more with the motor and the
patent road. That these contrivances, together with the device of
limited liability joint stock companies and the supersession of
agricultural labourers by skilled men with ingenious machinery, would
necessarily concentrate mankind in cities of unparallelled magnitude and
work an entire revolution in human life, became, after the event, a
thing so obvious that it is a matter of astonishment it was not more
clearly anticipated. Yet that any steps should be taken to anticipate
the miseries such a revolution might entail does not appear even to have
been suggested; and the idea that the moral prohibitions and sanctions,
the privileges and concessions, the conception of property and
responsibility, of comfort and beauty, that had rendered the mainly
agricultural states of the past prosperous and happy, would fail in the
rising torrent of novel opportunities and novel stimulations, never
seems to have entered the nineteenth-century mind. That a citizen,
kindly and fair in his ordinary life, could as a shareholder become
almost murderously greedy; that commercial methods that were reasonable
and honourable on the old-fashioned countryside, should on an enlarged
scale be deadly and overwhelming; that ancient charity was modern
pauperisation, and ancient employment modern sweating; that, in fact, a
revision and enlargement of the duties and rights of man had become
urgently necessary, were things it could not entertain, nourished as it
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