ABSTRACT
It is now an entirely false picture, of course, and by this time most of us surely know quite well that it is false. Nevertheless, its persisting attractiveness, the effect it still has on our national image of ourselves is one further example of the influence upon us of the lost world which vanished with the coming of industrial, urban life. In our day, at least four Englishmen out of every ten live in cities. Over half of us live in towns of 50,000 inhabitants and more,1 some of which are so vast that none of our rural ancestors would recognize his surroundings as human, should he find his way there through some impossible chronological vagary.
