Note 4 — Chapter IV · THE SUBURBS

It is impossible to doubt that Liverpool’s conspicuous devotion to the business of locomotion—a devotion that is briefly evidenced by the significant association of her name with the first railway, the first canal, one of the first sub-river underground railways, the first electric overhead railway, the first sustained application of electricity to long-distance railway traction, and now with these electric road cars—owed its first impulse to that comparative isolation of her early situation to which I referred in the first Chapter, and that the eager continuance of that devotion was largely due to the function of universal carrier which was afterwards imposed upon her. It is equally impossible to doubt that it was that early isolation which helped, at the outset, to foster her spirit of independent and concerted effort. And it is, therefore (to me, at any rate), rather a pleasant reflection, and not perhaps a wholly useless one, that the circumstance which primarily and directly induced that essential solidarity was also the circumstance which created the tools for riveting it; and that the creation of those tools was considerably aided by the apparition of precisely those forces which seemed to threaten her with a disrupting cosmopolitanism.