GARDEN CITY AND AGRICULTURE.
Garden City and Agriculture. By Thomas Adams. With Intro- duction by H. Rider Haggard. (Garden City Press. ls. 6d.)— This is an account of one side of the Garden City experiment. The keynote is the mutual advantage to be gained by the mingling of agriculture and decentralised industry, through closer markets, facilities for co-operation, the approximation of the values of building and agricultural land, &c. Mr. Adams writes as an economist and with a practical and scientific farmer's thorough knowledge of crops, soils, &c., and it is reassuring to read his pronouncement that " no scheme of social reform that does not pay can be permanently successful." Roughly speaking, two-thirds of the Company's property of three thousand eight hundred acres is reserved for agriculture. Small holdings are to be encouraged, ranging from those sufficient to keep a man and his family to one-eighth-of-an-acre allotments for artisans ; home industries are to go hand in hand with agriculture. The success of these will depend upon the individual holders, for in France, the home of petite culture, the energies of men content with a bare living from their proprietes have often been deadened. Credit banks for advancing capital are warmly commended by Mr. Haggard and Mr. Adams, and the experiments made else- where seem to be successful. Where the Garden City has chief need' to proceed with the utmost caution is in the tendencies towards collective ownership and municipal Socialism. Haste in these directions would be ruinous and alien to Mr. Adams's great common-sense. Security of tenure is, of course, desired; but when one knows of large estates on which farms are held in the same families for centuries on yearly leases, it is plain that the security can be obtained in other ways than by substituting for family settlements the collective ownership which Mr. Adams thinks desirable to avoid the "petty tyranny of the village." His sympathy with cheap and improved rural housing needs no praise, since it is so well known that his Company made the public- spirited offer of the site on which the Cheap Cottages Exhibition
SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
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