Numbers

Abstract

Broadly, there are three ways in which demand for goods can increase: firstly through an increase in numbers; secondly through an increase in spending power; and thirdly through a change in fashion or taste, whereby what was formerly spent on one particular set of goods is now spent on some other set. For all three reasons demand for goods and services increased substantially in Britain in the years after the Great Exhibition. To meet this demand industry had to expand and to be restructured; distribution had to be accelerated and made more efficient; taste had to be guided, and demand for one particular product in preference to another had to be stimulated. The outcome was a striking alteration in the life style of the bulk of the British population, and a major transformation of the nation’s industries.

The England of the past has been an England of reserved, silent men, dispersed in small towns, villages and country homes. The England of the future is an England packed tightly in such gigantic aggregations of population as the world has never seen before.

C. F. G. Masterman, The Heart of the Empire (1901).