s of supervision and direction
and with the smallest possible outlay of money.

Under this head I put, first, the matter of suburban homes for wage
earners; second, reclamation of desert, overflow, and cut-over areas,
together with improvement of abandoned farms, under a system of district
organization which may be made to finance itself; third, cooperation
with various States in the work of internal development.

GARDEN HOMES FOR THE PEOPLE.

There is no more baffling problem than that presented by the continued
growth of great cities, but it is a problem with which we must sometime
deal. It bears directly on the high cost of living and is, indeed,
largely responsible for it. Rent is based on land values. Land values
rise with increasing population. The price of food is closely related to
the growing disproportion between consumers and producers, resulting
from urban congestion.

Here is Washington, a city of some 400,000 people, doubtless destined
steadily to grow until--a Member of Congress predicts--it may touch
2,000,000 twenty years hence. Already the housing problem is acute, as
it is in almost every other large American city. It would be a pitiful
thing if the provision of more housing facilities to meet the needs of
growing population meant merely more congestion and higher rents, with
an ever-decreasing degree of landed proprietorship and true individual
independence. Such conditions, it seems to me, undermine the American
hearthstone and carry a deep menace to the future of our institutions. I
believe there must be a better way, and that the time has come when we
should make an earnest effort to find it.

Within a 10-mile circle drawn around the Capitol dome are thousands of
acres of good agricultural land, of which the merest fraction has been
reduced to intensive cultivation. Much of it is wastefully used, and
much of it is not used at all. Conditions of soil, climate, and water
supply are good and represent a fair average for the United States.
Suburban transportation is a serious problem in some localities and less
so in others, but tends to become more simple with the extension of good
roads and increasing use of motor vehicles, including the auto bus.

Somewhere and sometime, it seems to me, a new system must be devised to
disperse the people of great cities on the vacant lands surrounding
them, to give the masses a real hold upon the soil, and to replace the
apartment house with the home in a g