Their
cities are no longer tethered to running water and the proximity
of cultivation, their plans are no longer affected by strategic
considerations or thoughts of social insecurity. The aeroplane and
the nearly costless mobile car have abolished trade routes; a common
language and a universal law have abolished a thousand restraining
inconveniences, and so an astonishing dispersal of habitations has
begun. One may live anywhere. And so it is that our cities now are true
social gatherings, each with a character of its own and distinctive
interests of its own, and most of them with a common occupation. They
lie out in the former deserts, these long wasted sun-baths of the race,
they tower amidst eternal snows, they hide in remote islands, and bask
on broad lagoons. For a time the whole tendency of mankind was to desert
the river valleys in which the race had been cradled for half a million
years, but now that the War against Flies has been waged so successfully
that this pestilential branch of life is nearly extinct, they are
returning thither with a renewed appetite for gardens laced by
watercourses, for pleasant living amidst islands and houseboats and
bridges, and for nocturnal lanterns reflected by the sea.
Man who is ceasing to be an agricultural animal becomes more and more a
builder, a traveller, and a maker.
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