ELECTRICITY AND GREAT CITIES.
ELECTRICITY may do something for our cities, for it may not only give us a bright light at night, but may one day, when the means of producing it have advanced one
step further, give us a cheap one, thus reducing crime, as well as the inconvenience resulting from darkness, to a minimum.
A city continuously as bright as day would be comparatively easy to police. But that electricity will one day disperse or even remove the crowds of our cities, is a much more doubtful proposition. One idea is that the new motive-force will be most easily developed where water-power exists, and that, as water-power is moat available in mountainous districts, fac- tories will in the end be removed from the cities to the hill- sides. Another idea is that, as the force can be exerted in all places—though, no doubt, with some inequality as to expense- factory-owners will be tempted by the comparative cheap- ness of sites for their buildings, and houses for their workmen, to spread into distant villages, and to avoid the great centres of population. Neither speculation seems to us to rest on any sound basis. Long before the waterfalls are thoroughly utilised as a source of motive- power, methods will have been discovered—indeed, they are discovered already—of so distributing electric-power as to render locality of comparatively little importance. An insu- lated wire does not cost much, and if the original works are once completed, the fall of the Avon can be made to do work in London almost as readily as in Bristol. The facility of working will be nearly equal in all places, and if that is the case, the special attracting power of the great cities will remain just as great as at present. There will be as much advan- tage to be derived by employers from the concentration of labour, from the completeness of means of transport, and from the mental habits which great cities gradually develop. We suspect that the refined, who are so sen- sitive to the charm of rurality—a charm little perceived by the country labourer or artisan—habitually underrate
the valve of the citizen's life-long training. They think the close city makes him sickly—though its death-rate is so low—
and excitable, and unstable; and forget that it also makes him furiously competitive, or ambitious, enterprising, and indus- trious, with an industry of his own, quite separate in its kind.
It is not only that the citizen is cleverer, or, at least, more adaptable than the countryman, learning his work more easily, and taking more pride in its finish ; but that he will work positively harder, getting more out of himself in the same amount of time. His feverishness is an equivalent of energy. Owing to the peremptoriness of the conditions under which he lives, the city artisan gains an appreciation of the value of quickness,—that is, in truth, of the value of time, which becomes to him like a sixth sense. No one who has had much work to do in the country can remain unaware of this distinction, or fail to discern that the one drawback to country labour which cannot be removed is dilatoriness, an inability to believe that punctuality is gainful, or that in- dustry includes a willingness to get a job finished and out of the way of new labour. The citizen artisan is forced into this conviction, and gradually absorbs it, until he becomes by degrees twice as dependable, and therefore as valuable, as his country rival. If citizens had to dig ditches, they would work by the yard, and kill themselves before the day's stint was left unperformed ; and in so doing learn exactly what spade was lightest and strongest, [what slope could be made most rapidly, what movement of the arm would throw out most earth. The energetic habitudes of the citizen become inherent, and the born Londoner or Parisian or Berliner, if he will work at all, becomes, at a very early period of life, efficient in a way to which the countryman, unless a specially picked man, driven as a navvy is driven, rarely or never attains. We all assume that crowding is purely mischievous ; but it is crowding which breeds the marvellous industry of the Chinese, and forces the inhabitant of a great city into the mode of working which makes the countryman think him a being of another order. It is not only sharpness which crowding develops, but energy of a particular kind,—the energy which goes on relent- lessly until the work is done. No bribe will get a special work done in Dorsetahire with the continuous and unresting speed which for an equal bribe would be ensured in London.
Nor would the power of working elsewhere in any serious degree diminish to the worker the greatest attraction of the city, the superior happiness it confers. The assertion seems an absurd one to those whose ideal is peace, who weary of the strife, or who feel pressed and distracted by city life—the fate of most of the literary observers who alone discuss the case between town and country—but it is nevertheless quite true. The citizens of a city prefer their city because they are happier in it. They enjoy its life, its bustle, its variety, its changes, its society, even its strain, and that enjoy- ment, if not happiness, is a working substitute for it. They will not voluntarily quit the streets, and their contentment with crowded life, which involves contentment with labour in association, is one source, and no slight one, of their superior capacity so to labour.. They may be utterly wrong in their conclusions ; fresh air may be pleasanter than variety, solitude than company, independence than interdependence—to this writer those things appear as self-evident facts—but still, these are their conclusions, which, if the experience of modern mankind is at all to be trusted, nothing will ever alter. Of their own will, the multitude will prefer to work seeing each others' faces, hearing each others' voices, and relying on each other for certain forms of help which the " Nature" we all agree in literature to admire, and probably do admire with sincerity, steadily refuses. The mountain will not sympathise with your pleasure, the stream will sing though you are crying, the free air will do no part of the work which earns your living, nor, except to a few, and those generally weary minds, is there in hill or forest, river or cornfield, any audible society, or any equivalent for its continuous charm. The beasts are not friends except to naturalists and gamekeepers, and to the mass, the stir cf men relieves the permanent apprehensive- ness of the inner mind more than either the movement or the quiescence of Nature, more than the rush of the wind or the wave, or the silence which is among the lonely hills, and which, though divine to Wordsworth, is positively terrifying to London factory-girls, who, when transported into a wild country-side, can hardly keep from shouting to dispel the eerie quiet. We do not believe that any cause whatever, except commercial ruin, will destroy or seriously abate the attractive force of cities, or make men, whenever it is possible, cease to crowd themselves together. To the Roman, who at least had seen the world as a soldier, banishment from Rome was as a sentence of death ; and the Londoner intent on pleasure takes it in a crowd.
The hope of " distributing " the men of cities is, we are convinced, a vain hope, and we scarcely know why the culti- vated of to-day sympathise with it so much. That they do sym- pathise is clear, not only from their literature, but from the social projects they favour; but it is a little difficult to define the reason. It is not fear of the revolutionary tendencies of great cities, for, not to mention that great cities are often twice as Conservative as rural districts—compare Dublin with County Clare—those who are most anxious to " disperse " the people are often those least out of sympathy with Revolu- tionary ideas. Nor can it be a wish for the prosperity of the open country, for, to the cultivated, the transfer of the crowd to rural scenes would be a pure annoyance, and they retreat before " cheap trippers " even when on the side of Windermere. Their motive is, and must be, philanthropy; but philanthropy by itself, and apart from its object, is no more a sound guiding emotion than faith, when the object of faith is ill-chosen or un- regarded. There can be as much prosperity for the masses in a city as in the country ; more, if the judgment of those masses all over the world has in it anything in the nature of an instinct. Bodily health can be secured in the town, on the whole, better than in the village ; happiness, by the consent of the thronging multitudes, is in the street, and not in the field ; and as for intelligence—the production of which is the grand modern object, pushed often to ridiculous lengths—the world has long since agreed that it is the especial product of town life. We may doubt that at times ; but, as regards the mass of men, it is only thus far untrue that the powers which depend on mental calm or on continuous reflection develop with more difficulty in cities. Their varied life is distracting, and the true citizen is marked by high nervous energy, and not by the latent energy which some- times glows in the calm of the countryside. Shakespeare was moulded in Warwickshire, though he lived his life as a poet in London. There is something in the very air of a city which tends to quickness of thought, and we doubt, if our population could be again distributed evenly over the surface of the islands, as some philosophers and many Socialists vainly hope, whether the aggregate of mind-power in the Kingdom would not be seriously reduced. At all events, we do not
that the result will happen, except as the consequence of misfortunes such as once overtook the industrial cities of Belgium ; and the first consequence even of them in England would not be the dispersion, but the departure of our multi- tudes for lands where the growth of enormous cities remained a visible possibility.
Previous page
