Poverty, I would submit is at the root of our present discontent, not the poverty which the Poor Law and charity are to relieve, but the poverty of the great mass of the workers. Out of this poverty rises the enemy which threatens our peace and our greatness, and this poverty is due not to want of trade or work or wealth, but to the want of thought as to the distribution of our enormous national income. When the meaning of poverty is realized, the courage and the sacrifice which in the past have so often dared loss to avert danger will hardly fail because the loss to be faced is represented by the demand-note of the tax-collector. Gifts cannot avert the danger, repression will increase the danger, and the preachers who believe in the coming of the Kingdom must for the old text, “God loveth a cheerful giver,” substitute as its equivalent, “God loveth a cheerful taxpayer”. SAMUEL A. BARNETT. SECTION V. SOCIAL SERVICE. Of Town Planning--The Mission of Music--The Real Social Reformer--Where Charity Fails--Landlordism Up-to-date--The Church and Town Planning. OF TOWN PLANNING.[1] BY MRS. S. A. BARNETT. January, 1911. [1] From “The Cornhill Magazine”. By kind permission of the Editor. Much has been said lately about town planning. Conferences have been held, speeches have been made, articles have been written, papers have been read, and columns of newspaper-notices have appeared, and yet I am daring to occupy eleven pages of the CORNHILL MAGAZINE to try and add a few more remarks to what has already been so well and so forcibly put forth. But in apology for the presumption, it can be said that what I want to say does not entrench upon the province of the architect, the surveyor, or the artist. The questions of traffic-congestion, density of population, treatment of levels, arrangement of trams, water or gas, relation of railway termini or docks to thoroughfares, organization of periodic excess of street usage, relative positions of municipal buildings, harmony of material and design, standardization of streets and road grading, appreciation of scale; on these matters I will not write, for on them contributions, interesting, dull, suggestive, or learned, have been abundantly produced, and “are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles” of the great Conference held last month under the auspices of the Royal Institute of British Architects? And are not their potentialities visible beneath the legal phraseology of Mr. John Burns’ Town-planning Act of last Parliament?