From MR. T.C.  HORSFALL

(President, Manchester Citizen’s Association, &c.)

The teaching of the paper seems to me to be most sound and helpful.  The town of the future—­I trust of the near future—­must by means of its schools, its museums, and galleries, its playgrounds, parks and gymnasia, its baths, its wide tree-planted streets and the belt of unspoilt country which must surround it, bring all its inhabitants in some degree under the best influences of all the regions and all the stages of civilisation, the influences of which, but not the best influences, contribute, and have contributed, to make our towns what they are.

From H. OSMAN NEWLAND

(Author of “A Short History of Citizenship”)

The failures of democratic governments in the past have been attributable, in part, to the lack of intelligence and self-consciousness among the mass of those who were given a voice in the government of their country.  Citizenship, like morality, was allowed to grow by instinct; it was never systematised as a science, or applied as an art.  Sparta and Athens approached towards a system of civics much less elaborate than that expounded by Professor Geddes; but in Sparta citizenship became inseparable from Nationalism, and in Athens it scarcely rose above Municipalism.  In more modern times, civic education has had to encounter the same difficulty as in America, where the young citizen’s first duty is to salute his flag, and as in London, where “Civics” is distributed in doles of local [Page:  134] history in which the municipality plays a part altogether out of proportion to its relation to the country, the age, and the world.  Civics, as the applied sociology of each individual and each body of interests, has but begun to be dreamed of; and before it can be properly developed it is desirable, if not necessary, that the general public should know something more than at present both of the historic development of the “civic” idea, and of the psychology of aggregations as differentiated from the psychology of the individual.  Not until we can make “the man in the street” a conscious citizen, instead of a political automaton, shall we be able to enlist his sympathies with “Civics”; and without those sympathies the sociologist’s “Civics” will, I fear, be but partial and inaccurate.

From MR. G. BISSET SMITH

(H.M.  Registration Examiner for East of Scotland).

There is an elusiveness here and there in this paper which has helped to confirm me in the opinion that it is well to emphasise the fact that Prof.  Geddes is not only a dreamer of lofty dreams but a doer and a practical initiator.  He has expressed himself not only in words but in art and in architecture, and in educational organisation; and he has in many ways, sometimes indirectly, influenced scholastic and civic activities.