DIFFUSION OF GREAT CITIES
wench have marked their narrow limits in the distribution of the intervening villages. If by chance these gathering places have arisen at points much closer than this maximum, they have come into competition, and one has finally got the better of the other, so that in England the distribution is often singularly uniform. Agricultural districts have their towns at about eight miles, and where grazing takes the place of the plough, the town distances increase to fifteen.[1] And so it is, entirely as a multiple of horse and foot strides, that all the villages and towns of the world's country-side have been plotted out.[2]
A third and almost final factor determining town distribution in a world without railways, would be the seaport and the navigable river. Ports would grow into dimensions dependent on the population of the conveniently accessible coasts (or river-banks), and on the quality and quantity of their products, and near these ports, as the conveniences of civilisation increased, would appear handicraft towns—the largest possible towns of a foot-and-horse civilisation—with industries of such a nature as the produce of their coasts required.
It was always in connection with a port or navigable river that the greater towns of the pre-railway
- ↑ It will be plain that such towns must have clearly defined limits of population, dependent finally on the minimum yearly produce of the district they control. If ever they rise above that limit the natural checks of famine, and of pestilence following enfeeblement, will come into operation, and they will always be kept near this limit by the natural tendency of humanity to increase. The limit would rise with increasing public intelligence, and the organisation of the towns would become more definite.
- ↑ I owe the fertilising suggestion of this general principle to a paper by Grant Allen that I read long ago in Longman's Magazine.
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