town which should avoid the most prominent of these defects, and substitute advantages not yet possessed by any." In his work he exhibits a ground plan and a sketch of a town of about 1,000 acres, containing a population of 25,000, and surrounded by a large agricultural estate. Buckingham, like Wakefield, saw the great advantages to be derived by combining an agricultural community with an industrial, and urged: "Wherever practicable, the labours of agriculture and manufacture to be so mingled and the variety of fabrics and materials to be wrought upon also so assorted as to make short periods of labour on each alternately with others produce that satisfaction and freedom from tedium and weariness which an unbroken round of monotonous occupation so frequently occasions, and because also variety of employment develops the mental as well as physical faculties much more perfectly than any single occuption."
But though on these points the scheme is strikingly like my own, it is also a very different one. Buckingham having traced, as he thought, the evils of society to their source in competition, intemperance, and war, proposed to annihilate competition by forming a system of complete or integral co-operation; to remove intemperance by the total exclusion of intoxicants; to put an end to war by the absolute prohibition of gunpowder. He proposed to form a large company, with a capital of £4,000,000; to buy a large estate, and to erect churches, schools, factories, warehouses, dining-halls, dwelling-houses, at rents varying from £30 a year to £300 a year; and to carry on all productive operations, whether agricultural or industrial, as one large undertaking covering the whole field and permitting no rivals.
