Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/261

Rh change. He lives in a suburb; he is shot through a tube to an office-room in the City, and then shot back to his bedroom in the suburb; only on Saturdays and Sundays has he time for communal life, and then he amuses himself with neighbours who are tied to him by nothing essential. In the great majority of cases he never comes into living contact with a large and trained mind except through the printed page: for him, as for the industrial worker in the country, his life of ideas is detached from his responsible life, and both suffer infinitely in consequence.

Centralisation, however, is only one form of a more general process which I would call the segregation of social and economic functions owing to the national fatalism in the presence of the Going Concern. You have allowed industrial life to crowd certain districts and to leave other districts poor. I grant that in the past that was inevitable to some extent owing to the need of generating power near the collieries, but not to the extent that has occurred. By proper control you could have substituted a 'village region,' with a community dependent on each factory or group of small factories, wherein rich and poor, masters and men, might have been held together in a neighbourly responsible