THURSDAY, MARCH 14, 1901. THE RUSH TO CITIES.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 11, 14 March 1901, Page 17

THURSDAY, MARCH 14, 1901. THE RUSH TO CITIES.

fll. JOHNSON" regarded ' the sweet, slndy side of Pall Mall ' as the nearest approach to an earthly paradise .since the days of the \anished Eden. ' The happiness of London,' he once declared, ' is not Lo be conceived but iiy those who have been in it.' The brusque old lexicon-writer found country life duller than 'the fat weed that rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf.' 'No wise man,' said he, 'will go live in the country unless he has something to do which can be better done in the country.' And yet — with that sweet inconsistency which, somehow, became the rugged character of the man — he 'pinked' the epidermis of the English nobility of his time with the caustic remark that the decay of their oldtime military spirit was due to the fact that it had ' gone

into the city to look for a fortune.' From the Restoration to the Revolution the immense majority of the English nobility lived quietly for the greater part of each year in mansions upon their estates. Then the rush to the city gradually pet in— for the English nobility followed the fashion of the French court in this as in the lesser matter of the shape of their bob-wigs and the cut of their gowns and frills and ruffles. In the gilded days of Louis XIV. the old Freneii nobles, and Lhe uuuolia who Lad raked and •sorapod toother sufficient capital to support patents of nobility, and the bourgeoisie who would purchase fat employments, swarmed in their ponderous and lumbering coaches into the glare or shadow of the gayest court in Europe; and a courtier could say to the King : ' Whenever your Majesty creates an office, God creates a fool to buy it.'

The modern movement city-wards began at one end of the social scale. It seized upon the other after the spinningjenny and the water-frame and the ' mule ' and the power loom had opened up the era of the great industrial revolutiou in England. This was in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The steam-engine and allied inventions brought the movement in England onwards with a rush at a time when Continental nations were too eagerly hacking each others' eyes out to seethe start in the race for commercial supremacy which they were giving to their former insular enemy or ally. But they set to work as soon as the butchering was done and the knife was wiped clean and placed within its sheath and they had taken a breathing spell. Then they got the industrial fever and gradually swarmed into and widened out the old cities, and upon the green fields raised up new centres of busy population. America, too, caught the infection of industrialism. And one result of all the wheel-whirling and brick-piling was this : that the nineteenth century was, of all others, the age of great and rapidly-built cities, bulged out to extreme corpulence with overcrowded populations. Nothing like it had eyer been witnessed in the world before. Athens long held the supremacy of the eld world-art. But, according to Dr. Beloch, in its palmiest days its population did not exceed 100,000. Alexandria was a world-mart — a sort of Eastern London — in its prime. But it gave shelter to not over 500,000 souls — or about the population of Melbourne. Of the other famous trade centres of the olden time, Tyre — the New York of those far-off days — could (according to the estimate of Dr. Beloch) count only 40 000 souls within its circling walls — less than the population of Christchurch. Thebes could claim some 10,000 more — or about as many people as are gathered in Dunedin. And all the world wondered at Rome, whose massive ring of brick enclosed some 1100,000 persons at the time of the death of Augustus, fourteen years before the birth of (Jurist. This is about the population of Brooklyn, the fourth city in the United States. But it was none the less a massive head for an empire which, although it scrambled over portions of the surface of three continents, had (according to Bodio) a population (chiefly non-industrial and largely semi-barbarian) not exceeding 51,000,000. Imperial Rome presented the nearest approach to the urban conditions which, at the close of the nineteenth century, saw in Berlin in 1895, a population of 1,077,1304 souls ; in Paris, in 1896, 3,536,834; in New York, at the census of last year, ,'3,437,202 ; and in Greater London, as far back as 1891, a great Babel of 5,033,332 inhabitants.

But the industrial revolution has altered the old order. It h<i> HuDg agriculture where Shakespeare would throw physic — to the clogs. ' All the mechanical and chemical fcskill,' s.iys the author of Jlerrie England, ' and all the capital and energy of man, have been thrown into the struggle for trade profits and manufacturing pre-eminence.' Primary producers have in tens of thousands abandoned then* work and congregated around the factory boilers and made cities \\here the ox had grazed and the wheat-crop had been garnered in the days when Hargreaves and Arkwiiight were ' mewling and puking in their nurses' arms.' A recent address by Mr. Walton to the Statistical Society — as reported in the Saturday Review — shows that the population of England and Wales increased from 8,892,536 iv 1801 to nearly 32,000,000 in the year of graco 1900. But the lecturer pointed out that almost 400 per cent, of

this remarkable increase were huddled in towns, leaving the country districts almost as sparsely populated as they were in the days when Frank and Briton were hacking and hewing at each other in the Peninsula. In his National Progress (p. 5) Mulhall arrives at a like conclusion for the period 1841 — 1894, during which, he says, 'urban population moved four times as fast as rural.' According to the Statesman's Year Book the pace was even more rapid between 1881 and 1891 — the rural population of Englaud and Wales showing *n increapp of only 3*4 per cent, in that period as against 153 per cent, among the dwelleis in towns. At the census of 1891 the rural population was only 28 3 per cent, and the urban as high as 71 "7 per cent., of the inhabitants of England and Wales. And no country on the surface of our planet has so vast a proportion of its population resident in towns.

The loadstone that attracts population to towns is also at work, though with less striking results, in France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and in practically every Continental country in Europe. For brevity's sake we will merely summarise the main facts in point. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the face of Europe was estimated to be dotted over with a population of 175,000,000. In 1870 it had risen to 300,000,000. At present it stands at about 370,000,000. This is, in all reason, a rapid increase. But the increase in the number of cities of over 1 00,000 inhabitants shows it a clean pair of heels. In 1 8 2 1 there were in Europe only 21 such cities, counting among them an aggregate of 4,500,000 souls. In 1850 the number had risen to 75 ; in 1870 to 90, with a total population of about 20,000,000 ; and in 1896 to 121, which sheltered as many as 87,000,000 living inhabitants. In 1801 France had only three cities of over 100,000 population. England and Germany had only two each. But time and industrialism altered all that, and in 1896 England had 30 such cities, Germany 28, France 10. Dr. Johnson's views of city life seem to have a long, strong grip also upon the mind of young America. According to Mulhall, the ratio of urban to total population in the United States in 1800 was only 6*4 per cent. Sixty years later it had climbed as high as 135 per cent. In 18*80 (according to the Statesman's Year Book) it had reached 1 J 2 • 5 7 per cent. ; and at the census of 1890. twenty-nine people in every hundred in the United States were living in 286 towns of over 8000 inhabitants. In hi 3 valuable statistical work, The Seven Colonies of Austrntasia, 1899-1900, Mr. Coghlan siys that the growth of the chief cities of Australasia ' has no parallel among the cities of the old world. Even in America,' he adds, ' the rise of the great cities has been accompanied by a corresponding inciease in the rural population, but in these colonies, perhaps for the first time in history, was presented the spectacle of magnificent cities growing with marvellous rapidity, and embracing within their limits one third of the population of the States of which they are the seat of government. The abnormal aggregation of the population in their capital cities is a most unfortunate element in the progress in the colonies, and one which until recently seemed to become every year more marked.' Melbourne and Adelaide are the worst sinners in this repect. Sydney is also conspicuous. Wellington — New Zealand's capital — is a happy exception. And our four largest cities — Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin — taken together • contain only 25*51 per cent, of the whole population of the Colony.'

* * * This rush of population to cities has. especially in Great Britain, seriously disturbed the equilibrium of things, and in the not distant future promises to provide the Governments of various countries with some of the knottiest problems that ha\e ever exercised a statesman's brains. We will here brieily refer to three only of the difficulties created by this menacing movement of population. (1) r lhe first is the question of degeneration. Some years ago a prominent London surgeon expressed the opinion that the London-bred unit tends to die out after the third generation. Dr. Andrew Wilson neither accepts nor denies this opinion. But he maintains that the conditions of ordinary town life produce deterioration. (2) The neglect or partial abandonment of agriculture raises the great food question. It is a mere accident that the pressure of this aching difficulty is felt mo3t in Great Britain. A vast percentage of

the nation's food-supply comes from Russia, India, and the United States. And in possible — though, it is hoped, not even remotely probable — circumstances, a war with France or Russia might result in Great Britain beirg starved into prompt and hopeless surrender. We sorely need to have as much attention and talent devoted to agriculture as to the weaving and dyeing of cheap cotton prints. And our legislators would do well to paste in their hats the saying of Rhjhahi> Jl*ferieo : ' All ends in the same : iron mines, coal mines, factories, furnaces, the counter, the desk. No one can live on iron or coal or cotton — the object is really sacks of wheat.' (3) Yet another possible menace lurks in the vast masses that are crowded together in our great cities. It is the danger that lies in the sudden changes to which the course of invention or of legislation has time and again subjected industrial populations and forced their patience and endurance to a strain which they may not be always able to endure. It is no longer as in the days when Dick Whittington set his face towards London. The Hodge and Hans of to-day, lurching along citywards with slung bundles, may be preparing sleepless nights and anxious days for the Broughams and the Bismarcks of the twentieth century.

• * • While sundry quack-heads have been prescribing remedies for the crying evil of rural depopulation, local cures have been in operation here and there with varying measures of success. The Victorian village settlement scheme of a few years ago was mottled over with many a failure. A singularly well-managed agricultural school in Minnesota is credited with having settled 95 out of every 100 of its pupils on the land. Some societies of dames in Holland are said to have wrought wonders in the matter of removing the poor from the cities and rooting them on poultry and dairy farms. But the most luminously successful effort at enticing the surplus population of the cities back into the green and open country Btands to the credit of Denmark. It is the joint result of private enterprise and State aid applied to waste land reclaimed for the purpose. The scheme is described in a pamphlet published some five months ago by the Howard Association — Back to the Land: Denmark's Example. The little kingdom has an evil-tempered climate and a sullen sky. But its rulers have taken the lead in agricultural reform, with the happy result that, although it counts no very rich people among its population, Denmark has in a short period becomeaccording to Mulhall's figures for 1896 — the third country in Europe, and the fifth in the world, for average wealth. Our legislators might, with benefit to the Colony, turn the key in the front door of the Parliament Buildings for a session, and spend the talking-period among the green, flat farms and the trim-kept villages of Denmark.