The following pages are an enlargement of a paper read to the
University of London as the Creighton Lecture for 1910, and also
submitted in part to the London Conference on Town-planning in the
same year.

The original lecture was written as a scholar's contribution to a
modern movement. It looked on town-planning as one of those new
methods of social reform, which stand in somewhat sharp contrast with
the usual aims of political parties and parliaments. The latter
concern mainly the outward and public life of men as fellow-citizens
in a state; they involve such problems as Home Rule, Disestablishment,
Protection. The newer ideals centre round the daily life of human
beings in their domestic environment. Men and women--or rather, women
and men--have begun to demand that the health and housing and food and
comfort of mankind, and much else that not long ago seemed to lie
outside the scope of legislation, should be treated with as close
attention and logic and intelligence as any of the older and more
conventional problems of politicians. They will not leave even the
tubes of babies' feeding-bottles to an off-hand opportunism.

Among these newer efforts town-planning is one of the better known.
Most of us now admit that if some scores of dwellings have to be run
up for working-men or city-clerks--or even for University teachers
in North Oxford--they can and should be planned with regard to the
health and convenience and occupations of their probable tenants.
Town-planning has taken rank as an art; it is sometimes styled a
science and University professorships are named after it; in the
London Conference of 1910 it got its _deductio in forum_ or at
least its first dance. But it is still young and its possibilities