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.