Note (return) — Chapter IV
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He knew and I knew that his plea was hopeless. Even under the old conditions the Greek and Italian and Flemish City-States perished, because they were too small to protect themselves against larger though less closely organised communities; and industrial progress is an invader even more irresistible than the armies of Macedon or Spain. For a constantly increasing proportion of the inhabitants of modern England there is now no place where in the old sense they 'live.' Nearly the whole of the class engaged in the direction of English industry, and a rapidly increasing proportion of the manual workers, pass daily in tram or train between sleeping-place and working-place a hundred times more sights than their eyes can take in or their memory retain. They are, to use Mr. Wells's phrase, 'delocalised.'[97]