that the suburbs were kept in the hands of the community, instead of being handed over to private owners who would absorb all the unearned increment.  Even if this eulogium betrayed exaggeration still a student of civics might feel that the economic conditions of that town were worth studying.  Similarly, in New Zealand, the adoption in 1891 of the tax on land values brought prosperity to the towns, and changed the tide of emigration from New Zealand into immigration.  Again, at home they had Bourneville, Port Sunlight, and that most interesting of all present-day experiments in this country, the Garden City, all of these being founded by men with ideals.  He could not help feeling [Page:  117] that a student of civics, possessed of such a fair working knowledge of the city he lived in as most of them might reasonably lay claim to, would make more real progress by studying the success or failure of social experiments, than by entering on the very formidable task that seemed to be set before them by Professor Geddes.  However, when they left abstract civics, as they had it portrayed to them in these papers, and turned to the architectural or the historical side of concrete civics, there should be no better guide than Professor Geddes, whose labours in Edinburgh, and whose projected schemes for the improvement of Dunfermline, were becoming widely known.

MR. TOMKINS (of the London Trades Council) said: 

If before any person was allowed to serve on our different public bodies, he should be required to attend a course of lectures such as those given by Professor Geddes on civics, that would surely be a means of developing his social interests, and would tend to eliminate that self-interest which too often actuated public men.  There was nothing more difficult than for workmen to-day to be able to take larger views.  The workman’s whole business was now so different from what is was in the days of the arts and crafts guilds of the Middle Ages; they now found him ground down into some little division of industry, and it was quite impossible for him to work in his own way.  Thus he got narrow-minded, because concentrated on some minor process.  He was kept at work with his nose to the mill the whole time, and it became too exhausting for him to try and take these larger views of life.  He often thought of the amount of talent and energy and practical beauty which was wasted in our workshops to-day.  Referring to the Garden Cities of this country and the United States, Mr. Tomkins said the idea of getting great Trusts to use their money in a social spirit, and not merely to get the workers tied to their mills, was really something which opened out a vista of grand possibilities in the future; but if any movement was to be successful it would be necessary to teach the great masses of workers, and to create a real sound social public opinion amongst them.

PROFESSOR GEDDES’ reply