What are the outward physical aspects of Coketown? To begin with, the city is laid out by an engineer; it is laid out with a mathematical correctness and with a complete disregard for the amenities. If there are hills where Coketown ought to stand, the hills are leveled; if there are swamps, the swamps are filled; if there are lakes, the lakes are drained away. The pattern to which Coketown’s activities are fitted is that of the gridiron; there are no deviations and no allowances in the working out of this plan; never will a street swerve as much as a hair’s breadth to save a stand of trees or open up a vista. In the matter of transportation and intercourse, the aim of Coketown is to “get somewhere”; and it fancies that by laying down straight lines and joining them in rectangles this aim is expedited; despite the demonstration in every city of older growth that a radial system of intercommunication is much more economical than the gridiron. As a result, there is no terminus to any of the avenues of Coketown; for they begin on a draughting board and end in infinity. It is impossible to approach from the front the jails, hospitals, and sanatoria of which Coketown boasts; the tendency is to run past them. So much for the physical layout of the industrial city; what remains is obscured by smoke. The factory is the center of Coketown’s social life; and it is here that the greater part of the population spend their days. At its purest, that is to say, during the first half of the nineteenth century, and in a great many centers to this day, the factory is the only institution that provides anything like a social life, in spite of the fact that the unremitting toil which accompanies its routine reduces the graces of social intercourse to such a minimum that drunkenness and copulation are the only amusements which the inhabitants can engage in as a relief from their noble duty of providing the rest of the world with necessities, comforts, luxuries, and nullities. The Coketown idolum has been disintegrating a little during the last two decades, under the influence of the garden cities movement, and I am aware that in certain departments I am celebrating a lost cause and an abandoned idealism; but there still remain in acres and acres of workingmen’s dwellings, such as one finds in Battersea and Philadelphia, and in old-fashioned railway stations, and in buildings like the Mechanics Halls of Pittsburgh and Boston, a notion of what Coketown stood for when Coketown, the Frankenstein which had been created by the Country House, had not been repudiated by its master.