* * * * The second visitor represented a movement
that is startling, though very few are startled. He repreiented the town- planning branch of the Ministry of Health, which has powers that few countrymen appreciate. So have the county councils and the rural district councils, as these bodies themselves are rather slow to understand. It is a little startling to a land- owner who has owned his acres since the time of Bacon, let us say, to hear that it is proposed to schedule—that is the blessed word—his park or fields as an open space in perpetuity. It is also a little startling to a freeholder, whose windows overlook a green and pleasant slope, to hear that the fields in front are scheduled for eight houses to the acre. Now the mills of the town-planners of to-day grind slowly. The technique is deliberate, and even clumsy ; but they are extremely potent. They represent almost as revolutionary a treatment of land as Mr. Henry George himself would have wished.
Previous page
