Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/372

368 are several ways in which this can be done which I can but name. We can create new cities on new sites, with all the advantages and none of the drawbacks of the old ones—garden cities of the type so eloquently and convincingly advocated by Mr. Howard, in which the needs of industry and the needs of humanity will be reconciled. Charles Kingsley in his philanthropic ardor foresaw something of the kind for he dreamt of cities—which should be "a complete interpenetration of city and country, a complete fusion of their different modes of life and a combination of the advantages of both, such as no country in the world has ever seen." And his vision has come to pass. We have Bourneville and Port Sunlight—cheering oases in the industrial desert—and better still we have Letchworth, gradually coming into being, on a broader basis and with greater amplitude of design. Letchworth is still incomplete, but two visits to it have enabled me to appreciate the judicious way in which it has been mapped out, the excellence of all its sanitary arrangements, and the rapid progress it is making. It is full of promise, and it would, it seems to me, be a national calamity should any want of financial support prevent the project in its entirety from being carried to a successful issue. It is to provide for 30,000 inhabitants, and that will not be much of a depletion for congested London, but whenever Letchworth is an accomplished fact, other garden cities will be undertaken. The transference of manufacturing industries to the country is feasible; it has indeed been going on for some time both in this country and America, in the avoidance of high rents and rates, and where suitable sites in the country can be provided with suitable accommodation for workers, with cooperating industries around, and with facilities for obtaining power, industries will congregate and garden cities arise.

Another way in which we can tap our great cities of their clogging superfluities of population, is by establishing in our dominions beyond the sea, land colonies, under some such scheme as that so ably excogitated by Mr. Eider Haggard. There are in our cities crowds of men and women brought up on the land, who have drifted into the city, and tossed about there as social flotsam, miserable failures, who with families of young children would gratefully embrace the chance of returning to conditions such as formed the surroundings of their youth, and of rectifying their own mistakes, by placing their children's feet on the path of prosperity. Such families carefully selected, settled in parties, if possible made up from the same towns at home, in well chosen localities, under skilled and sympathetic management and with necessary financial assistance to start with would undoubtedly do well as have done the indigent settlers at Port Amity, while their removal would clear the air of our towns at home.

But the best of all methods and the most promptly available for