harsh and intrusive to forbid a central garden plot or peristyle,
such as one sees in Pompeii, within the house walls, and it is
almost as difficult to deny a little private territory beyond the
house. Yet if we concede that, it is clear that without some further
provision we concede the possibility that the poorer townsman (if
there are to be rich and poor in the world) will be forced to walk
through endless miles of high fenced villa gardens before he may
expand in his little scrap of reserved open country. Such is already
the poor Londoner's miserable fate.... Our Utopia will have, of
course, faultless roads and beautifully arranged inter-urban
communications, swift trains or motor services or what not, to
diffuse its population, and without some anticipatory provisions,
the prospect of the residential areas becoming a vast area of
defensively walled villa Edens is all too possible.

This is a quantitative question, be it remembered, and not to be
dismissed by any statement of principle. Our Utopians will meet it,
I presume, by detailed regulations, very probably varying locally
with local conditions. Privacy beyond the house might be made a
privilege to be paid for in proportion to the area occupied, and the
tax on these licences of privacy might increase as the square of the
area affected. A maximum fraction of private enclosure for each
urban and suburban square mile could be fixed. A distinction could
be drawn between an absolutely private garden and a garden private
and closed only for a day or a couple of days a week, and at other
times open to the well-behaved public. Who, in a really civilised
community, would grudge that measure of invasion? Walls could be
taxed by height and length, and the enclosure of really natural
beauties, of rapids, cascades, gorges, viewpoints, and so forth
made impossible. So a reasonable compromise between the vital and