I propose to establish in every large town what I may call "A Household Salvage Brigade," a civil force of organised collectors, who will patrol the whole town as regularly as the policeman, who will have their appointed beats, and each of whom will been trusted with the task of collecting the waste of the houses in their circuit. In small towns and villages this is already done, and it will be noticed that most of the suggestions which I have put forth in this book are based upon the central principle, which is that of restoring; to the over-grown, and, therefore, uninformed masses of population in our towns the same intelligence and co-operation as to the mutual wants of each and all, that prevails in your small town or village. The latter is the manageable unit, because its dimensions and its needs have not out-grown the range of the individual intelligence and ability of those who dwell therein. Our troubles in large towns arise chiefly from the fact that the massing of population has caused the physical bulk of Society to outgrow its intelligence. It is as if a human being had suddenly developed fresh limbs which were not connected by any nervous system with the gray matter of his brain. Such a thing is impossible in the human being, but, unfortunately, it is only too possible in human society. In the human body no member can suffer without an instantaneous telegram being despatched, as it were, to the seat of intelligence; the foot or the finger cries out when it suffers, and the whole body suffers with it. So, in a small community, every one, rich and poor, is more or less cognizant of the sufferings of the community. In a large town, where people have ceased to be neighbourly, there is only a congested mass of population settled down on a certain small area without any human ties connecting them together. Here, it is perfectly possible, and it frequently happens, that men actually die of starvation within a few doors of those who, if they had been informed of the actual condition of the sufferer that lay within earshot of their comfortable drawing-rooms, would have been eager to minister the needed relief. What we have to do, therefore, is to grow a new nervous system for the body politic, to create a swift, almost automatic, means of communication between the community as a whole and the meanest of its members, so as to restore to the city what the village possesses. I do not say that the plan which I have suggested is the only plan or the best plan conceivable. All that I claim for it is that it is the only plan which I can conceive as practicable at the present moment, and that, as a matter of fact, it holds the field alone, for no one, so far as I have been able to discover, even proposes to reconstitute the connection between what I have called the gray matter of the brain of the municipal community and all the individual units which make up the body politic.