Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/483

Rh come in to take their places in any large numbers. For the immigrant from the congested districts of the town, and for the emigrant from the decaying rural parishes, we must look to the suburbs; and we find him there, if figures can tell us anything. Compare, with the list just given of stationary or declining areas in central London, the statistics for a few of the regisrationregistration [sic] divisions which lie farther out:

"Here is where the increase of 'Greater London,' with its five and a half millions of inhabitants, is found. It is not, as hasty observers have imagined, in the teeming alleys of 'Darkest London,' or in the warren of rabbit-hutches which spreads for a mile or two north and south of the Thames. The center of population is shifting from the heart to the limbs. The life-blood is pouring into the long arms of brick and mortar and cheap stucco that are feeling their way out to the Surrey moors and the Essex flats and the Hertfordshire copses. Already 'Outer London' is beginning to vie in population with the 'Inner Ring'; a few decades hence, and it will have altogether passed it."

These figures for different portions of London are exceedingly significant, and show precisely the same conditions as are shown by the facts which I have already grouped relative to New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, and they show conclusively that the movement is greatly different from what it is often supposed to be. To again quote Mr. Low: "The population is not shifting from the fields to the slums; and the slums themselves are not becoming fuller, but the reverse. So far from the heart of the city being congested with the blood driven from the extremities, we find, on the contrary, that the larger centers of population are stationary, or thinning down; it is the districts all round them which are filling up. The greatest advance in the decade is shown not in the cities themselves, but in the ring of suburbs which spread into the country about them. If the process goes on unchecked, the Englishman of the future will be of the city but not in it. The son and grandson of the man from the fields will neither be a dweller in the country nor a dweller in the town. He will be a suburb-dweller. The majority of the people of this island will live in the suburbs; and the suburban type will be the most