It is so delightful to realize that some of the best brains of this and other countries are turning their thoughts to the solution of what Mr. T. S. Horsfall (who for many years was a voice crying in the wilderness) demanded as the elemental right of every human being, “the conditions of a healthy life”. It is comforting to know that others are doing the thinking, especially when one is old, and can recall one’s passionate, youthful indignation at the placid acceptance of stinking courts and alleys as the normal homes for the poor, when the memory is still vivid of the grand day when one portion of the network of such courts, in St. Jude’s parish, was swept away, and a grave, tall, carefully planned tenement building, erected by the public-spirited kindness of the late Mr. George M. Smith, arose in its stead, “built to please Barnett as an experiment”. Some five-and-twenty years ago, when old Petticoat Lane was pulled down, my husband sent in to the Local Authority a suggestion of laying the area out so that Commercial Road should be continued right through to Bishopsgate; the letter and plans were merely acknowledged and the proposal ignored. Five years ago we filled one of the rooms in the Whitechapel Exhibition with plans of how East London might be improved, but it elicited only little interest, local or otherwise; and now last month, but a few years later, all the walls of Burlington House were covered with town-planning exhibits, drawings, plans, and designs, and its floor space amply supplied with models from all parts of the world. And the thought given is so fresh, so unconventional, and so full of characteristics, that one came away from a careful study of that great Exhibition with a clear sense of the individualities of the various nations, as they had stated their ideals for their towns. Some in broad avenues, great piazzas, parallel streets, careful to adopt Christopher Wren’s ideal, that “gardens and unnecessary vacuities ... be placed out of the town”. Some in fairy cities, girt with green girdles of open space, tree-lined roads, parks designed for quiet as well as for play, waterways used for pleasure locomotion as well as for business traffic, contours considered as producers of beauty, the view as well as the shelter planned for. Some with scrupulous care for the history of the growth of the city, its natural features, the footmarks left by its wars, each utilized with due regard to modern requirements and the tendencies of the future. Some glorying in the preservation of every scrap which could record age or civic history, others blatantly determined to show that the old was folly, and that only of the brand-new can it be said “the best is yet to be”.