reality of the whole scene.  Now, the really wonderful thing in this astonishing development of cheap, abundant, swift locomotion we have seen in the last seventy years—­in the development of which Mauretanias, aeroplanes, mile-a-minute expresses, tubes, motor-buses and motor cars are just the bright, remarkable points—­is this:  that it dissolves almost all the reason and necessity why men should go on living permanently in any one place or rigidly disciplined to one set of conditions.  The former attachment to the soil ceases to be an advantage.  The human spirit has never quite subdued itself to the laborious and established life; it achieves its best with variety and occasional vigorous exertion under the stimulus of novelty rather than by constant toil, and this revolution in human locomotion that brings nearly all the globe within a few days of any man is the most striking aspect of the unfettering again of the old restless, wandering, adventurous tendencies in man’s composition.

Already one can note remarkable developments of migration.  There is, for example, that flow to and fro across the Atlantic of labourers from the Mediterranean.  Italian workmen by the hundred thousand go to the United States in the spring and return in the autumn.  Again, there is a stream of thousands of prosperous Americans to summer in Europe.  Compared with any European country, the whole population of the United States is fluid.  Equally notable is the enormous proportion of the British prosperous which winters either in the high Alps or along the Riviera.  England is rapidly developing the former Irish grievance of an absentee propertied class.  It is only now by the most strenuous artificial banking back that migrations on a far huger scale from India into Africa, and from China and Japan into Australia and America are prevented.

All the indications point to a time when it will be an altogether exceptional thing for a man to follow one occupation in one place all his life, and still rarer for a son to follow in his father’s footsteps or die in his father’s house.

The thing is as simple as the rule of three.  We are off the chain of locality for good and all.  It was necessary heretofore for a man to live in immediate contact with his occupation, because the only way for him to reach it was to have it at his door, and the cost and delay of transport were relatively too enormous for him to shift once he was settled. Now he may live twenty or thirty miles away from his occupation; and it often pays him to spend the small amount of time and money needed to move—­it may be half-way round the world—­to healthier conditions or more profitable employment.

And with every diminution in the cost and duration of transport it becomes more and more possible, and more and more likely, to be profitable to move great multitudes of workers seasonally between regions where work is needed in this season and regions where work is needed in that.  They can go out to the agricultural lands at one time and come back into towns for artistic work and organised work in factories at another.  They can move from rain and darkness into sunshine, and from heat into the coolness of mountain forests.  Children can be sent for education to sea beaches and healthy mountains.