All our history shows us to be a practical people with short views. "_Tiens! Une montagne!_" Never was a better summing up of British character than those words of the French cartoonist during the Boer War, beneath his picture of a certain British General of those days, riding at a hand gallop till his head was butting a cliff. Without seeing a hand's breadth before our noses we have built our Empire, our towns, our law. We are born empiricists, and must have our faces ground by hard facts, before we attempt to wriggle past them. We have thriven so far, but the ruin of England is likely to be the work of practical men who burn the house down to roast the pig, because they cannot see beyond the next meal. Visions are airy; but I propose to see visions for a moment, and Britain as she _might_ be in 1948. I see our towns, not indeed diminished from their present size, but no larger; much cleaner, and surrounded by wide belts of garden allotments, wherein town workers spend many of their leisure hours. I see in Great Britain fifty millions instead of forty-one; but the town population only thirty-two millions as now, and the rural population eighteen millions instead of the present nine. I see the land farmed in three ways: very large farms growing corn and milk, meat and wool, or sugar beet; small farms _co-operatively run_ growing everything; and large groups of co-operative small holdings, growing vegetables, fruit, pigs, poultry, and dairy produce to some extent. There are no game laws to speak of, and certainly no large areas of ground cut to waste for private whims. I see very decent cottages everywhere, with large plots of ground at economic rents, and decently waged people paying them; no tithes, but a band of extinguished tithe-holders, happy with their compensation. The main waterways of the country seem joined by wide canals, and along these canals factories are spread out on the garden city plan, with allotments for the factory workers. Along better roads run long chains of small holdings, so that the co-operated holders have no difficulty in marketing their produce. I see motor transport; tractor ploughs; improved farm machinery; forestry properly looked after, and foreshores reclaimed; each village owning its recreation hall, with stage and cinema attached; and public-houses run only on the principle of no commission on the drink sold; every school teaching the truth that happiness and health, not mere money and learning, are the prizes of life and the objects of education, and for ever impressing on the scholars that life in the open air and pleasure in their work are the two chief secrets of health and happiness. In every district a model farm radiates scientific knowledge of the art of husbandry, bringing instruction to each individual farmer, and leaving him no excuse for ignorance. The land produces what it ought; not, as now, feeding with each hundred acres only fifty persons, while a German hundred acres, not