An Englishman Looks at the World | Page 7

illumination at which a sceptic might reasonably mock; they were
prepared with ample reasons for the things they foretold. Now, quite as
confidently, they point on to a new series of consequences, high
probabilities that follow on all this tremendous development of swift,
secure, and cheapened locomotion, just as they followed almost
necessarily upon the mechanical developments of the last century.
Briefly, the ties that bind men to place are being severed; we are in the
beginning of a new phase in human experience.
For endless ages man led the hunting life, migrating after his food,

camping, homeless, as to this day are many of the Indians and
Esquimaux in the Hudson Bay Territory. Then began agriculture, and
for the sake of securer food man tethered himself to a place. The
history of man's progress from savagery to civilisation is essentially a
story of settling down. It begins in caves and shelters; it culminates in a
wide spectacle of farms and peasant villages, and little towns among
the farms. There were wars, crusades, barbarous invasions, set-backs,
but to that state all Asia, Europe, North Africa worked its way with an
indomitable pertinacity. The enormous majority of human beings
stayed at home at last; from the cradle to the grave they lived, married,
died in the same district, usually in the same village; and to that
condition, law, custom, habits, morals, have adapted themselves. The
whole plan and conception of human society is based on the rustic
home and the needs and characteristics of the agricultural family. There
have been gipsies, wanderers, knaves, knights-errant and adventurers,
no doubt, but the settled permanent rustic home and the tenure of land
about it, and the hens and the cow, have constituted the fundamental
reality of the whole scene. Now, the really wonderful thing in this
astonishing development of cheap, abundant, swift locomotion we have
seen in the last seventy years--in the development of which
Mauretanias, aeroplanes, mile-a-minute expresses, tubes, motor-buses
and motor cars are just the bright, remarkable points--is this: that it
dissolves almost all the reason and necessity why men should go on
living permanently in any one place or rigidly disciplined to one set of
conditions. The former attachment to the soil ceases to be an advantage.
The human spirit has never quite subdued itself to the laborious and
established life; it achieves its best with variety and occasional
vigorous exertion under the stimulus of novelty rather than by constant
toil, and this revolution in human locomotion that brings nearly all the
globe within a few days of any man is the most striking aspect of the
unfettering again of the old restless, wandering, adventurous tendencies
in man's composition.
Already one can note remarkable developments of migration. There is,
for example, that flow to and fro across the Atlantic of labourers from
the Mediterranean. Italian workmen by the hundred thousand go to the
United States in the spring and return in the autumn. Again, there is a
stream of thousands of prosperous Americans to summer in Europe.

Compared with any European country, the whole population of the
United States is fluid. Equally notable is the enormous proportion of
the British prosperous which winters either in the high Alps or along
the Riviera. England is rapidly developing the former Irish grievance of
an absentee propertied class. It is only now by the most strenuous
artificial banking back that migrations on a far huger scale from India
into Africa, and from China and Japan into Australia and America are
prevented.
All the indications point to a time when it will be an altogether
exceptional thing for a man to follow one occupation in one place all
his life, and still rarer for a son to follow in his father's footsteps or die
in his father's house.
The thing is as simple as the rule of three. We are off the chain of
locality for good and all. It was necessary heretofore for a man to live
in immediate contact with his occupation, because the only way for him
to reach it was to have it at his door, and the cost and delay of transport
were relatively too enormous for him to shift once he was settled. Now
he may live twenty or thirty miles away from his occupation; and it
often pays him to spend the small amount of time and money needed to
move--it may be half-way round the world--to healthier conditions or
more profitable employment.
And with every diminution in the cost and duration of transport it
becomes more and more possible, and more and more likely, to be
profitable to move great multitudes of workers seasonally between
regions where work is needed in this season and regions where work is
needed in that. They can go out to the agricultural lands