150 THE GROWTH OF CITIES
where the emigrants land, and consequently has no such inertia to overcome. Australia is therefore the representative of the new order of things, toward which the modern world is advancing.
It is thus in the dynamic rather than the static aspect that the true significance of the agglomeration of population manifests itself. The reasons why the distribution of population in England is so different from that in India are clearly seen when one studies the causes of the movement which has made the England of to-day so different, as regards the distribution of population, from the England of 1800. Then it will appear that the physical features of, say, England and India, count for less as a factor in the problem than the qualities of the race and its progress in material civilization. It is not to be denied that even the material civilization of a country depends upon its natural advantages to a certain extent, but the principal consideration after all is the use to which such advantages are put by their possessors. China is known to be rich in coal and iron—the fundamental elements of machine industry—but China has not become a great industrial nation like England. While, therefore, the topography and the resources of the country and also the density of its population do sometimes influence the distribution of the population (notably Australia, Turkey, Uruguay, Argentina), in the majority of cases it is economic organization that constitutes the decisive influence.
If now the percentages of urban population in the different countries given in Table CXII, be compared for the years 1800, 1850, and 1890, as in the accompanying diagram, it will be found that the urban growth has very generally taken place since 1850. The exceptions are England and Scotland, the United States, and in a smaller degree, Belgium, Saxony and France. In the two former, the process of concentration wrought greater changes in 1800-50 than in
