Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill CITY DRIFT The most significant movement of population today in both Europe and America is the constant migration of people from the country to the cities. This population drift, one of the many results of modern industrialism, is of the greatest social consequence. It portrays economic and social motives that indicate an increasing urbanizing of civilized people everywhere. An impetus toward the urban concentration of people, started by the industrial development of the last century, is greatly stimulated by the social conditions of the twentieth century. This movement, already excessive, is becoming still more pronounced as a result of conditions created by the experiences of the world-war; and everywhere rural statesmanship is attempting to cope with the problem. The drift of rural people to the cities appears to be even greater in Europe than in this country. Most of the European cities have been growing faster than our own. In Germany, France, and England especially a constant depopulation of the rural districts is more and more making Europe one vast urban area. From 1881 to 1891 the French cities of thirty thousand inhabitants or over addedto their respective numbers more than three times as many as the total increase of population for the entire country. In the same period Paris absorbed four-fifths of the entire increase of population of France during the decade.1 For France as a whole the rural population has decreased during the sixty years between 1846 and 1906 as much as i6f per cent.2 We have startling testimony from a student and lover of rural England regarding city drift in his country: When we turn to the question of the decrease in the inhabitants of English rural districts, it is to find ourselves confronted with some startling figures. I rea…
