It was not that the prophets professed any mystical and inexplicable
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