Page:Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902).djvu/173

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POSTSCRIPT.

"To-Morrow," of which this book is substantially a reproduction, having been published towards the end of 1898, the reader who has followed me thus far will be interested to learn what has been done, and what is proposed to be done to realise the project which was there set forth. I will endeavour to answer these questions.

At the outset, I perceived that the first thing was to make the project widely known—that the city which was pictured so vividly in my own mind must be pictured more or less vividly by many, and that a strong and widespread desire for its up-rearing must be created before a single step could be wisely taken to put the project in a concrete form. For the task before me was, I was fully conscious, a most difficult one, and demanded the hearty co-operation of men and of women[1] experienced in very numerous departments of human activity; and many of these had to be reached and enlisted. City building, as a deliberately thought-out enterprise, is indeed a lost art, in this country at least, and this art has not only to be revived, but has to be carried to finer issues than those who have before practised it ever dreamt of. Autocrats like Alexander the Great and Philip II. could build cities according to

  1. Woman's influence is too often ignored. When Garden City is built, as it shortly will be, woman's share in the work will be found to have been a large one. Women are among our most active missionaries.