DECENTRALIZATION & SELF-GOVERNMENT
electric power can now be distributed, the movement
towards the decentralization of industry is not yet a very
powerful one. Great centres of population, like London
and Paris, possess an enofmous power of attraction to
industries. The greater the population, the greater the
market; and the greater the market, the stronger the gravi-
tational pull exercised upon the manufacturer. New indus-
tries establish themselves on the outskirts of large cities and
make them become still larger. For the sake of slightly
increased profits, due to lower distributing costs, the manu-
facturers are busily engaged in making London chaotically
large, hopelessly congested, desperately hard to enter, or
leave, and vulnerable to air attacks as no other city of
Europe is vulnerable. To compel a rational and planned
decentralization of industry is one of the legitimate, the
urgently necessary functions of the state.
Life in the great city is atomistic. How shall it be given
a communal pattern? How shall the individual be incor-
porated in a responsible, self-governing group? In a
modern city, the problem of organizing responsible com-
munity life on a local basis is not easily solved. Modern
cities have been created ,and are preserved by the labours
of highly specialized technicians. The massacre of a few
thousands of engineers, administrators and doctors would
be sufficient to reduce any of the great metropolitan centres
to a state of plague-stricken, starving chaos. Accordingly,
in most of its branches, the local government of a great city
has become a highly technical affair, a business of the kind
that must be centrally planned and carried out by experts.
The only department in which there would seem to be a
possibility of profitably extending the existing institutions
of local self-government is the department concerned with
police-work and the observance of laws. I have read that
in Japan, the cities were, and perhaps still are, divided into
wards of about a hundred inhabitants apiece. The people
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