Chapter 194 of the Acts of the Virginia General Assembly for the session of the year 1906 provides as follows: “Any city or town of this Commonwealth may acquire by purchase, gift or condemnation property adjoining its parks, or plats on which its monuments are located, or other property used for public purposes, or in the vicinity of such parks, plats or property, which is used and maintained in such a manner as to impair the beauty, usefulness or efficiency of such parks, plats or public property, and may likewise acquire property adjacent to any street, the topography of which, from its proximity thereto, impairs the convenient use of such street, or renders impracticable, without extraordinary expense, the improvement of the same, and the city or town so acquiring any such property may subsequently dispose of the property so acquired, making limitations as to the uses thereof, which will protect the beauty, usefulness, efficiency, or convenience of such parks, plats or property.” CONGESTED AREAS In considering a model plan for the city of Chicago, attention is naturally called to the example of European cities which have removed the inhabitants from whole areas where the population was congested or the arrangement of the streets unwholesome, and have transplanted them to new territory while the condemned area was being renovated or rebuilt. The Plan of Chicago does not contemplate any imitation of such examples. The police power is adequate to the destruction, without recompense, of single buildings which are insanitary or unsafe; but the legislature of Illinois has not yet undertaken to go further and license the condemnation by municipal authorities of congested or unwholesome areas under the power of eminent domain. Local drainage districts may be organized, with power to reclaim wet agricultural lands and locate ditches over private property, on the payment of proper compensation; and it would also doubtless be competent for the legislature to sanction the taking by eminent domain of a district even within the city which was by nature low or pestilent, as was done with the Back Bay flats in Boston. Different considerations, however, apply to an area where the noxious conditions are due to the arrangement of streets or to the manner of building upon land by individual owners. Each proprietor might with reason demand the right to be dealt with individually; and if his own lot was vacant, or was improved with buildings transgressing no sanitary laws or regulations, he might well oppose any scheme which required him to part with his land on account of the transgression of his neighbors. A tract of land fit to breed pestilence because of the niggardliness of nature might be reclaimed under the power of eminent domain, because the arch offender was not subject to the police jurisdiction of the state; but if a plague spot