We much regret to record the death of Sir Ebenezer
Howard, the founder of the town-planning movement and the creator of Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities. He died at Welwyn aged seventy-eight. This observant, humane and reflective man, althoUgh he had no natural advantages, formed a great idea, kept it before him and brought it ultimately to a great realization. He could never see any civic clumsiness, any stupidity in social administration, without thinking out the remedy. His original plan of a garden city was probably borrowed from Mr. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. He started his movement by writing Garden Cities of To- morrow. In 1899 he formed the Garden City Association. By occupation he was a shorthand writer, but his hobby was inventing, and in his last years he had produced a machine for typing shorthand. It is, however, as a social inventor that he will be immortal. He overcame immense difficulties in order to introduce ideas of which the full range and benefit have as yet been only dimly imagined. * * * *
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