Sec. 3

It is well to note how these ninety millions of people whose social future we are discussing are distributed.  This huge development of human appliances and resources is here going on in a community that is still, for all the dense crowds of New York, the teeming congestion of East Side, extraordinarily scattered.  America, one recalls, is still an unoccupied country across which the latest developments of civilisation are rushing.  We are dealing here with a continuous area of land which is, leaving Alaska out of account altogether, equal to Great Britain, France, the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, Belgium, Japan, Holland, Spain and Portugal, Sweden and Norway, Turkey in Europe, Egypt and the whole Empire of India, and the population spread out over this vast space is still less than the joint population of the first two countries named and not a quarter that of India.

Moreover, it is not spread at all evenly.  Much of it is in undistributed clots.  It is not upon the soil; barely half of it is in holdings and homes and authentic communities.  It is a population of an extremely modern type.  Urban concentration has already gone far with it; fifteen millions of it are crowded into and about twenty great cities, another eighteen millions make up five hundred towns.  Between these centres of population run railways indeed, telegraph wires, telephone connections, tracks of various sorts, but to the European eye these are mere scratchings on a virgin surface.  An empty wilderness manifests itself through this thin network of human conveniences, appears in the meshes even at the railroad side.

Essentially, America is still an unsettled land, with only a few incidental good roads in favoured places, with no universal police, with no wayside inns where a civilised man may rest, with still only the crudest of rural postal deliveries, with long stretches of swamp and forest and desert by the track side, still unassailed by industry.  This much one sees clearly enough eastward of Chicago.  Westward it becomes more and more the fact.  In Idaho, at last, comes the untouched and perhaps invincible desert, plain and continuous through the long hours of travel.  Huge areas do not contain one human being to the square mile, still vaster portions fall short of two....

It is upon Pennsylvania and New York State and the belt of great towns that stretches out past Chicago to Milwaukee and Madison that the nation centres and seems destined to centre.  One needs but examine a tinted population map to realise that.  The other concentrations are provincial and subordinate; they have the same relation to the main axis that Glasgow or Cardiff have to London in the British scheme.

Sec. 4