Even as a show then, I venture to submit that such a "Towneries" might
readily be arranged to excel in interest, and surpass in usefulness, the
excellent "Fisheries," "Healtheries", and other successful exhibitions
in the record and recent memory of London. The advantages of such an
exhibition are indeed too numerous for even an outline here; but they
may be easily thought out more and more fully. Indeed, I purposely
abstain for the present from more concrete suggestion; for the
discussion of its elements, methods, plans, and scale will be found to
raise the whole range of civic questions, and to set these in freshening
lights.
[Page: 111] At this time of social transition, when we all more or less
feel the melting away of old divisions and parties, of old barriers of
sects and schools, and the emergence of new possibilities, the continual
appearance of new groupings of thought and action, such a Civic
Exhibition would surely be specially valuable. In the interest, then, of
the incipient renascence of civic progress, I plead for a Civic
Exhibition.[14]
[14] Since the preceding paper was read, it is encouraging to note the
practical beginnings of a movement towards a civic exhibition,
appropriately arising, like so many other valuable contributions to
civic betterment, from Toynbee Hall. The Cottages Exhibition initiated
by Mr. St. Loe Strachey at Garden City, and of course also that
admirable scheme itself, must also be mentioned as importance forces in
the directions of progress and propaganda advocated above.
Of such an exhibition, the very catalogue would be in principle that
_Encyclopædia Civica_, into which, in the previous instalment of this
paper (vol. I, p. 118) I have sought to group the literature of civics.
We should thus pass before us, in artistic expression, and therefore in
universal appeal, the historic drama of the great civic past, the
mingled present, the phantasmagoria and the tragi comedy of both of
these. We should then know more of the ideals potential for the future,
and, it may be, help onward some of the Eutopias which are already
struggling towards birth.
DISCUSSION
The Chairman (THE RT. HON. CHARLES BOOTH) said:
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