Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/370

366 for that state of things, viz., regulations directed against overcrowding; the acquisition of special areas by the authorities for the obligatory rehousing in the same neighborhood of those disturbed under parliamentary powers; and the acquisition by municipalities of vacant land for the construction of suitable dwellings. These are excellent as far as they go, but seem to me to be palliatives rather than remedies. They shift the load a little but do not really lighten it, and it has been, perhaps, the perception of their futility that has been responsible for the half-hearted manner in which they have been applied. Real relief is only to be obtained by establishing an outflow from the center to the circumference, and it is by affording increased facilities of locomotion that this may be done. It is to the new motive power that is now advancing with such giant strides that we must look for the removal of some of our housing embarrassments. Railway extensions, tube railways, surface and subsurface tramways, and motor omnibuses and cycles will inevitably bring into existence a number of new suburbs around our big cities, to which, if the cost of transit be kept low and rents remain modest, many of the poorer classes who are not compelled to live near the factory or shop will resort, all the more readily if a shortening of the working day gives time for the journeys to and fro, and if associations be formed to help them to become the owners of their houses. And to these suburbs, should the cost of transit and the time occupied by it or high rents prove prohibitive to the working classes, the well-to-do will in numbers retreat, making room for their humbler neighbors in the inner circles. It is probable, too, that these new suburbs would in some degree intercept the streams of population that are perpetually flowing into the towns from the country, for statistics show that as regards London, at any rate, immigrants settle mainly in the most outlying parts.

The new suburbs of towns will, of course, always spring up on lines of communication and where facilities are offered for building speculation, and spread out around, but it is to be hoped that they will be taken in hand in time, and means devised to limit their indefinite expansion. Mr. Charles Booth has said that towns advancing, show a noticeable tendency to shoot out tongues like the sun's corona, the intervals between them being filled up later, and it is this filling up of the intervals between them that should, if possible, be prevented. Island-suburbs are well enough, but when they swell out, become continuous, and form a girdle round the parent town, they aggravate its evils, and help to strangle it. It has been proposed that air should be supplied to the center of great cities by mechanical means—by the Shone vacuum system, for example, in connection with tube railways—but infinitely preferable to any such artificial arrangement, necessarily finical and liable to break down, is a liberal scheme of natural