greater the town, the greater its advantages. It offers roads,
railroads, canals; the choice of skilled labour increases constantly, new
establishments can be built more cheaply because of the competition among
builders and machinists who are at hand, than in remote country
districts, whither timber, machinery, builders, and operatives must be
brought; it offers a market to which buyers crowd, and direct
communication with the markets supplying raw material or demanding
finished goods. Hence the marvellously rapid growth of the great
manufacturing towns. The country, on the other hand, has the advantage
that wages are usually lower than in town, and so town and country are in
constant competition; and, if the advantage is on the side of the town to-
day, wages sink so low in the country to-morrow, that new investments are
most profitably made there. But the centralising tendency of manufacture
continues in full force, and every new factory built in the country bears
in it the germ of a manufacturing town. If it were possible for this mad
rush of manufacture to go on at this rate for another century, every
manufacturing district of England would be one great manufacturing town,
and Manchester and Liverpool would meet at Warrington or Newton; for in
commerce, too, this centralisation of the population works in precisely
the same way, and hence it is that one or two great harbours, such as
Hull and Liverpool, Bristol, and London, monopolise almost the whole
maritime commerce of Great Britain.

Since commerce and manufacture attain their most complete development in
these great towns, their influence upon the proletariat is also most
clearly observable here. Here the centralisation of property has reached
the highest point; here the morals and customs of the good old times are
most completely obliterated; here it has gone so far that the name Merry
Old England conveys no meaning, for Old England itself is unknown to
memory and to the tales of our grandfathers. Hence, too, there exist