DECENTRALIZATION & SELF-GOVERNMENT
price of a certain tendency on the part of neighbours to
disclaim liability for one another and throw their responsi-
bilities entirely upon the central authority. Under a
perfectly organized system of state socialism charity would
be, not merely superfluous, but actually criminal. Good
Samaritans would be prosecuted for daring to interfere in
their bungling amateurish way with what was obviously a
case for state-paid professionals.
The last three generations have witnessed a vast incfease
in the size and number of large cities. Life is more exciting
and more money can be earned in the cities than in villages.
and small towns. Hence the migration from country to
city. In the van of this migrating host have marched the
ambitious, the talented, the adventurous. For more than a
century there has been a tendency for the most gifted
members of small rural communities to leave home and
seek their fortunes in the towns. Consequently what
remains in the villages and country towns of the indus-
trialized countries is in the nature of a residual population,
dysgenically selected for its lack of spirit and intellectual
gifts. Why is it so hard to induce peasants and small
farmers to adopt>new scientific methods? Among other
reasons, because almost every exceptionally intelligent child
born into a rural family for a century past has taken the
earliest opportunity of deserting the land for the city.
Community life in the country is thus impoverished; but
(and this is the important point) the community life of the
great urban centres is not correspondingly enriched. It is
not enriched for the good reason that, in growing enormous,
cities have also grown chaotic. A metropolitan 'wen/ as
Cobbett was already calling the relatively tiny London of
his day, is no longer an organic whole, no longer exists as
a community, in whose life individuals can fruitfully par-
ticipate. Men and women rub shoulders with other men
and women; but the contact is external and mechanical.
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