, as we know, the
centres of manufacture, they have, like the brick and mortar desert of London,
disappeared; only, since they were centres of nothing but manufacture, and
served no purpose but that of the gambling market, they have left less signs of
their existence than London. Of course, the great change in the use of
mechanical force made this an easy matter, and some approach to their break-up
as centres would probably have taken place, even if we had not changed our
habits so much: but they being such as they were, no sacrifice would have seemed
too great a price to pay for getting rid of the manufacturing districts, as they
used to be called. For the rest, whatever coal or mineral we need is brought to
grass and sent whither it is needed with as little as possible of dirt,
confusion, and the distressing of quiet people's lives. One is tempted to
believe from what one has read of the condition of those districts in the
nineteenth century, that those who had them under their power worried, befouled,
and degraded men out of malice prepense: but it was not so; like the
mis-education of which we were talking just now, it came of their dreadful
poverty. They were obliged to put up with everything, and even pretend that they
liked it; whereas we can now deal with things reasonably, and refuse to be
saddled with what we do not want.«
    I confess I was not sorry to cut short with a question his glorifications of
the age he lived in. Said I: »How about the smaller towns? I suppose you have
swept those away entirely?«
    »No, no,« said he, »it hasn't gone that way. On the contrary, there has been
but little clearance, though much rebuilding, in the smaller towns. Their
suburbs, indeed, when they had any, have melted away into the general country,
and space and elbow-room has been got in their centres: but there are the towns
still with their streets and squares and market-places; so that it is by means
of these smaller towns that we of to-day can get some kind of idea of what the
towns of the older world were like; - I mean to say at their best.«
    »Take Oxford, for instance,« said I.
    »Yes,« said he, »I suppose Oxford was beautiful even in the nineteenth
century. At present it has the great interest of still preserving a great mass
of precommercial building, and is
