a great service might be rendered.  At least once a year, these little groups of men might meet together at some general conference, and, by the exchange of their opinions and by the mutual helpfulness of intellectual intercourse, raise up and perfect civic ideals which would be a boon to this country.  We suffer at present, I think, from the too great particularisation of our efforts.  We get one man devoting himself exclusively to a blind asylum, another seeming to take no interest in anything but a deaf-and-dumb institute or the like, and yet another devoting himself to charity organisation.  It is all excellent work, but the difficulty is to get broad, comprehensive views taken of the common good.  To reduce poverty and to check physical degeneracy, there must be an effort continuously made to [Page:  116] raise the tone of the environment in which we live.  The home and the city need to be made wholesome and beautiful, and the people need to be encouraged to enlarge their minds by contact with nature, and by the study of all that is elevating and that increases the sum of social responsibility.

MR. E.S.  WEYMOUTH said: 

He found it somewhat difficult to see what was to be the practical outcome of civics if studied in the way proposed.  Would Professor Geddes consider it the duty of any Londoner, who wished to study sociology practically, to map out London, and also the surrounding districts, with special reference to the Thames River Basin, as appeared to be suggested in both Professor Geddes’ papers?  Looking at civics in its practical or ethical aspect, he was bound to confess that, though he had acquired a tolerable knowledge of the geography of the Thames Basin, he did not feel it helped him materially towards becoming a better citizen of London.  Would Professor Geddes wish them to study, first, London with its wealth side by side with its squalor and filth, and then proceed to study another large town, where the same phenomena presented themselves?  What gain would there be in that proportionate to the labour entailed?  In his own case, so disheartened had he felt by observing that all their efforts, public and private, for the improvement of their civic conditions seemed to end in raising considerably the rents of the ground landlords of London, while leaving the bulk of the population engaged in a hard struggle for their existence, that he had for years past found it difficult to take much interest in municipal affairs, so long as the rates and taxes were—­as it seemed to him—­put upon the wrong shoulders.  And for the study of civics, he had preferred to turn to those cities where efforts were being made to establish communal life on what seemed to him juster conditions.  In 1897, he was struck with the title of an article in the “Daily Telegraph.”  It was headed, “The Land of Beauty, Society without Poverty, Life without Care.”  He found the article was a description of Durban in Natal.  The writer attributed the prosperity of this town to the fact