Page:Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902).djvu/132

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GARDEN CITIES OF TO-MORROW.

moment on the recent unexampled rate of progress and invention, doubt that the next sixty years will reveal changes fully as remarkable? Can any person suppose that these mushroom forms, which have sprung up as it were in a night, have any real permanence? Even apart from the solution of the labour problem, and the finding of work for the thousands of idle hands which are eager for it—a solution, the correctness of which I claim to have demonstrated—what possibilities are opened up by the bare contemplation of the discovery of new motive powers, new means of locomotion, perhaps, through the air, new methods of water supply, or a new distribution of population, which must of itself render many material forms altogether useless and effete! Why, then, should we squabble and wrangle about what man has produced? Why not rather seek to learn what man can produce; when, aiming to do that, we may perhaps discover a grand opportunity for producing not only better forms of wealth, but how to produce them under far juster conditions? To quote the author of "Merrie England": "We should first of all ascertain what things are desirable for our health and happiness of body and mind, and then organise our people with the object of producing those things in the best and easiest way."

Wealth forms, then, in their very nature are fugitive, and they are besides liable to constant displacement by the better forms which in an advancing state of society are constantly arising. There is, however, one form of material wealth which is most permanent and abiding; from the value and utility of which our most wonderful inventions can never detract one jot, but will serve only to make more clear, and to render more