When we try to get to the root of our social vices of to-day we ultimately find ourselves contemplating the sad effects of the steady stream of population away from the green meadows on to the grey pavements. Overcrowding in the towns and dilapidation in the villages are the result. At best, under existing conditions there must always be a fringe of our city population living from hand to mouth, contracting the character of the casual and the loafer. But this fringe is made much broader by the present urban immigration; the tarnished threads in it are of finer quality than they would be otherwise, and the original excellence of some of its stuff makes it all the more prone to vices of certain kinds. The problem which good citizenship has to solve then, it seems to me, is twofold. It has to discover how people can be induced to stay on the land, and how, in towns, they can be provided with proper surroundings. The only hope of a rural population in England is the spread of intensive cultivation and of co-operative agriculture,[9] and that again can hardly become general until our present system of landlordism is broken up and public authorities own the land and let it to suit the convenience of cultivators. The town problems must be solved by a combination of public and private associated effort. We must give up all hope of private owners being able to supply decent houses at reasonable rents. The municipality should become the sole housing authority within its own area, and where it spreads out its arms of tramways beyond its own boundaries it should be able to develop building estates on its lines of communication. With a housing and tram policy should be combined a recreation policy, for it is the lack of recreation in modern city life which leads to so many vicious indulgences. Parks, music, museums, libraries, hardly touch the needs of the workman no longer on the sunny side of thirty-five, wearied after a day’s work. The public-house or the workman’s club is his resort. Here we come to the centre of our difficulty. We cannot meet the needs of the average workman who is not a teetotaller unless we place the public-house under public control. This seems to me to be the first step, not only towards national temperance, but towards the provision of that rational amusement which is to protect our industrial population from vicious allurements.[10]