and from thence, at least for the great majority, there is no chance of more than, at best, a very short stay in the country.  No:  the tide flows resistlessly [Page:  120] onward to make more crowded our overcrowded tenements, to enlarge our overgrown cities, to cause suburb to spread beyond suburb, to submerge more and more the beautiful fields and hilly slopes which used to lie near the busy life of the people, to make the atmosphere more foul, and the task of the social reformer more and yet more difficult.

But surely there must be a way, could we but discover it, of imitating the skill and bountifulness of Nature, by creating channels through which some of our population shall be attracted back to the fields; so that there shall be a stream of population pouring from the city into the country, till a healthy balance is restored, and we have solved the twin problems of rural depopulation and of the overcrowded, overgrown city.

This brings me to the second branch of Prof.  Geddes’ paper, the historical.  The Professor reminds us how vestiges of one civilisation lie super-imposed upon another, like geological strata, and asks.  “Understanding the present as the development of the past, are we not preparing also to understand the future as the development of the present?” Following this line of thought, I venture to suggest that while the age in which we live is the age of the great, closely-compacted, overcrowded city, there are already signs, for those who can read them, of a coming change so great and so momentous that the twentieth century will be known as the period of the great exodus, the return to the land, the period when by a great and conscious effort a new fabric of civilisation shall be reared by those who knew how to apply the knowledge gained by “Social Survey to Social Service.”  What are the signs?  What words can we place under the head of “Incipient” in Prof.  Geddes’ diagram?  I would suggest, for one of Prof.  Geddes’ interrogation marks might be substituted “Decentralisation of Industry”—­as a great, but yet incipient movement, represented by Port Sunlight, Bournville, Garden City.  For there are now many agencies at work making for industrial decentralisation.  Industries are being driven out of the great towns by the excessive rents and rates which have to be paid there—­by the difficulty of obtaining adequate space for the modern factory, a one-storey building; and for the homes of our workers, which must be vastly different to what they now are if England is to maintain her place among the nations.  And while factories are being driven from the city, they are also being attracted to the country by its newly-discovered potentialities.  Thus Messrs. Lever Brothers, crowded out of Warrington, established an entirely new town on a new site at Port Sunlight; and, because the site was new and raw, it was therefore possible for Mr. Lever to plan his little town with a single eye to the best and most desirable conditions, alike from