The London County Council was not the first to make the experiment of building decent and substantial houses for the labouring classes. Some thirty years before, on what is known as the Shaftbury Park Estate, 1,200 houses, which provide homes for eleven thousand people, were erected and the investment had been made to pay. I looked down the long lanes of little vine-covered buildings which make up this estate. It seemed as if some great army had settled on the land and built permanent quarters. These labour colonies were interesting, not merely for the improvement they had made in the lives of a large section of the people living in this part of the city, but as the forerunner of those garden cities which private enterprise has erected at places like Port Sunlight, near Liverpool; Bourneville, in the outskirts of Birmingham, and at Letchworth, thirty-four miles from London. Not far from Battersea Park, and in a part of the city which was formerly inhabited almost wholly by the very poor, we visited the public baths and a public washhouse where, during the course of a year, 42,000 women come to wash their clothes, paying at the rate of three cents an hour for the use of the municipal tubs and hot water. Children pay a penny or two cents for the use of the public baths. The building is also provided with a gymnasium for the use of the children in winter, and contains a hall which is rented to workingmen's clubs at a nominal price. What pleased me most was to see the orderly way in which the children had learned to conduct themselves in these places, which, as was evident, had become not merely places for recreation, but at the same time schools of good manners. We passed on the streets groups of neatly dressed, well-bred looking boys, with their books slung over their arms, going home from school or making their way to the park. Mr. Burns was delighted at the sight of these clean-cut, manly looking fellows. "Look at those boys, Mr. Washington," he would exclaim, as he pointed proudly to one or another of these groups. "Isn't that doing pretty well for the proletariat?" Then he would leap out of the automobile, before the driver could stop, put his arm around the boy nearest him and, in a moment, come back triumphant with the confirmation of his statement that the boy's father was, as he had said, only a small clerk or a letter carrier, or, perhaps, the son of a common labourer, a navvy. When I contrasted the appearance of these well-dressed and well-behaved boys with some of those I had seen elsewhere, with the children who attend the so-called "ragged" schools, for example, I understood and shared his enthusiasm. From Battersea Park we went to Clapham Common and, as we were speeding along through what appeared to be a quarter of well-to-do artisans' homes, Mr. Burns nodded casually in the direction of a little vine-clad cottage and said: "That is where I live."