Page:Garden Cities.djvu/29

 subject is generally realised and the Garden City proposals are accepted by the public as the appropriate means of securing the distribution of the industrial population upon the land, it will be possible to go further and to purchase and hold large tracts of land suitable for the establishment of industrial towns as crown lands to be sold or leased upon terms which would cover their cost, or the interest upon their cost, as the case might be. We are carrying on the work in the hope and belief that our practical experiment will open the eyes of the public to the utility of our methods for ensuring healthy conditions of labour to the operative classes, and to the great advantage to civil life which must result from the laying out of towns scientifically upon a predetermined plan, by companies which are in fact trustees for the benefit of the future inhabitants.

There is no necessity at the present time for interference with individual effort generally or for the substitution of collective effort for it, but there is a crying need for the organisation of individual effort. Experience has already shown that unorganised competitive individualism has in some respects had a disastrous effect upon the general welfare of the nation. However distasteful it may be to those educated in the traditions of the Anglo-Saxon race the situation must be faced and the fact recognised that the future is for the nations which are capable of collective organisation. And the occasion with us is, as I have already shown, a crying one. Men's minds at the present time are appalled at the destruction and suffering now running riot in Manchuria. Without the least desire to minimise the horrors of war, I venture to say that the evils existing at home under our own eyes are more horrible still. It is only habit which enables us to tolerate them. War's victims are counted by their tens of thousands, the victims of our social errors by their hundreds of thousands.