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 within a limited area, without sufficient time being given to
evolve a suitable environment, or to prepare themselves for the
environment which they actually found on every side of them. London in
the past, therefore, cannot help us so very much to solve the riddles of
London in the present, because London in the past ha