Professor Geddes’ very interesting “Study in City Development” is highly suggestive, and shows how great a difference thoughtful and tasteful treatment might make in dealing with such problems.  It is sad to think of the opportunities wasted, and of the more ignorant and often too hasty clearances for traffic which have often been apparently the sole motives in city improvement.  The conservation of historic buildings, whenever possible, the planting of trees along our streets, the laying out of gardens, the insistence upon a proportional amount of air and open space to new buildings would go a long way towards making our bricks-and-mortar joyless wildernesses into something human and habitable.

Whether, under favourable circumstances and the rare public spirit of private owners, much can be done, or to any wide extent, so long as absolute individual ownership in land and ground values is allowed, seems to me very doubtful.  We cannot hope to see great social improvements without great economic changes, but every effort in the direction of improving the beauty of our cities is welcome to all who have the well-being of the community at heart; and such work as Prof.  Geddes is doing should arouse the keenest interest and the earnest attention of all who realise its immense social importance.

From MR. J.H.  HARLEY, M.A.

If sociology is ever to vindicate itself as an art, it must be able to analyse and explain the present, and to some extent at least to cast the horoscope of the future.  It must feel its way through all the tangled labyrinths of city life, and show us where we have arrived and whither we are going.  But this is exactly the part of Professor Geddes’ Applied Sociology where he becomes most vague and unsatisfactory.  “Enough for the present,” we are told, “if it be admitted that the practical man in his thought and action in the present is mainly as yet the too unconscious child of the past, and that in the city he is still working within the grasp of natural conditions.”  Now we must all be willing to admit that the present is the child of the past, and that we cannot adequately understand [Page:  132] the present until we have led up to the present by the study of its antecedents more and less remote.  But what Professor Geddes fails to bring out is that it is only in the present or the more immediate past that the City has really become a City in the modern sense of the word.  The City as City is a product of the Industrial Revolution.  Its huge and casual assemblages of human life, its overcrowding, its poverty line, its East End and its West End, its infantile mortality, its trades massed in their own particular districts, it aliens, its criminals and its vices—­all these problems of social pathology arise from the fact that the conditions of modern industry have brought people together who have few interests in common, and who were compelled to arrange themselves in some kind of decent order