Time was when the affinity on the market had the biggest advantage

Time was when the affinity on the market had the biggest advantage. Now the farmer can lift the celery in Michigan or the beets in Dakota and sell them in New York about as [58] easily as though he lived on Long Island. It any more a site, which defines business to be
Continued in a specific place, but natural advantages, more or less independent of a site. But the railway or a steamship very often define, where new business should be developed. This acceleration and humiliation of transportation have given such stimulus in the present moment to growth of the big cities. It allows them to pull cheap food from much territories, and it forces business to define a site where the widest communication of sale should be available instead of where the goods or raw materials are most easily provided. These are fast and convenient services of transportation which our big cities possess, which distances force to great shopping centres. Buyers for thirty or forty miles around can reach easily these centres, and the result consists that trade gathers in the centres, instead of in local points. The city of one million population in the most productive agricultural section of the country could not eat, if the food reach a city, uniting in a command. With this growth of trade the centres there arrives the increased benefit of the big dealers at the expense of the small; with it there arrives the organised assumption and its accompanying results, good and harm.