All these affairs, especially the manner in which the town is to be built, are worked out in considerable detail; thus the size and character of the houses are set forth on the plan, and it is provided that each workingman is to occupy at least one entire and separate room for himself; whilst each married couple without children gets two rooms, and each family in which there are children is to occupy at least three rooms for domestic purposes. I have set down all these details baldly because the plan itself is a bald one; and no amount of fine writing will embellish it. Buckingham’s society is not based upon a thoroughgoing criticism of human institutions: the ends for which this society exists are doubtless those which were held good and proper by the Macaulays and the Martineaus. What is interesting in Buckingham’s utopia is the definite plans and specifications, accompanied by drawings; for this is surely one of the first attempts to put a problem in social engineering on a basis from which an engineer or an architect could work. Buckingham thought that, given a successful model town, the rest of England might in time be colonized by the surplus population, and thus the old centers of black industry would be wiped out. Nor was Buckingham altogether deceived. His utopia was a limited one, but out of his limitations has come success. In 1848 this utopia was a chimera; in 1898, Mr. Ebenezer Howard reconstructed it and set it forth in a persuasive little book called Tomorrow, and as a direct result of the plans advocated by Mr. Howard, a flourishing garden city called Letchworth has come into existence; which in turn has propagated another garden city, called Wellwyn; and at the same time has, by example, paved the way for numerous garden villages and garden suburbs in various parts of Europe and in America. With this mid-Victorian theorist, we pass over from a pre-scientific method of thinking to one which sacrifices the artistic imagination to a realistic grasp of the facts; and in this passage something is gained and something is lost. Buckingham gains by confining his proposals to what is immediately practicable. He loses by not having the imaginative energy to criticize the ways, means, and ends that are sanctioned by current practise. If utopia begins with Plato’s glorious dream of an organic community, the image of the just man made perfect, it cannot end with Buckingham’s invention of a shell. Nevertheless, through the nineteenth century the superficial utopians, the shell-builders, are dominant; and we must continue to examine them. CHAPTER SEVEN How some Utopians have thought that a good community rested at bottom on the right division and use of land; and what sort of communities these land-animals projected. CHAPTER SEVEN 1