If we examined in detail a typical agricultural county, we should probably find that while its one or two considerable towns of 40,000 or 50,000 inhabitants were growing at something above the average rate for the whole country, the smaller towns of 5000 to 10,000 were only just managing to hold their own, the smallest towns and large villages were steadily declining, while the scattered agricultural population remained almost stationary.

For it is the small towns and the villages that suffer most, for reasons which will shortly appear.
Sec.3.Effects of Agricultural Depression .-- We have next to ask what is the nature of this attractive force which drains the country to feed the city population?
What has hitherto been spoken of as a single force will be seen to be a complex of several forces, different in kind, acting conjointly to produce the same result.
The first readily suggests itself couched under the familiar phrase, Agricultural Depression.

It is needless here to enlarge on this big and melancholy theme.

It is evident that what is called the law of Diminishing Return to Labour in Agriculture, the fact that every additional labourer, upon a given surface, beyond a certain sufficient number, will be less and less profitably employed, while the indefinite expansion of manufacture will permit every additional hand to be utilized so as to increase the average product of each worker, would of itself suffice to explain why in a fairly thickly populated country like England, young labourers would find it to their interest to leave the land and seek manufacturing work in the cities.

This would of itself explain why the country population might stand still while the city grew.