A

LL over England at the various centers of munitionsmaking during the last two years there have been blossoming new garden cities. There is Gretna, for instance, the largest of them, with 16,000 inhabitants prettily and cozily housed amid green lawns and winding roads, with water, gas, and sewers, play-fields, churches, schools, and public buildings, all complete, where two years ago was only vacant moor.

There are scores of such magic towns and villages, and more to come, and they house several hundred thousand of the workers who feed the endless river of shells and guns and war equipment that now so abundantly supplies the armies in France. Queensferry, Well Hall, Glengarnock, East Riggs, Lanark, are some of the places that will attract gaping American business tourists after the war.

Life is worth living in these villages. Workers were withdrawn for six weeks from one great arsenal to build a dance hall in the village, and the statesmen of England say it paid in munitions output.

The ablest city planners in Great Britain planned these towns to make them convenient, economical, and pleasant to the eye. Instead of a crude gridiron of streets cutting obstinately and expensively across the irregular levels, the ingenious planner cons his contour map and lays curving streets to follow the lay of the land, avoiding cuts and fills and steep grades. Instead of wasteful broad streets for trifling traffic, there are generous thoroughfares here and slender lanes there. Instead of long, monotonous straight lines of curb and roof and wall, there are easy curves and charming irregular vistas, and the houses stand in groups at broken angles to catch the maximum sunlight. Inside the blocks-if these variegated blobs of green can be called blocks-we find unfenced lawns and sheltered spaces so attractive that many of the houses prefer to face that way and turn their backs upon the street. Gardens for vegetables or flowers are separately grouped at convenient locations for those who desire such allotments.

Step into spacious Gretna Institute. One floor is for men, the

other for women. Smoking-room, billiard-room, auditorium, tearoom, dance floor, lockers and showers, and something going on for everybody.

There are some hotels and boarding-houses, but a few partitions will some day convert them into one-family homes.

Step into one of the snug little houses, part of an irregular, rambling building with a broken roof line. A living-room, scullery, and perhaps a parlor on the ground floor, and three bedrooms and bath above, heated by coal grates, after the English fashion, and all for a rent so shockingly low that it leaves the well-paid munitions worker rolling in ready money.

And here we reach the gist of it all. If private landlordism had supplied these homes, we would have seen the following sequence of events: 1. Munitions plant located. 2. Influx of population, local land values boom. 3. Munitions plant cries for labor and offers high wages. 4. Builders try to buy land to put up houses for labor, pay inflated price for land, charge for it in the rent. 5. Labor finds high wages nullified by high rent and fades away. 6. Munitions plant offers higher wages. 7. Landlords levy higher rents and owners of empty land announce higher prices. Net result-high cost of munitions, incessant labor turnover, disorganization, labor troubles, landowners and speculators making fortunes. That is the American method.

The English method is different. The English national Government located these towns, built them, and owns every house, park, fence, bush, road, pipe, wire, and recreation hall in them. By Parliamentary authority it took the lands, not at the boom value that followed the creation of the munitions plants, but at vacant land pre-war valuation. And it reserves the further right to take as much more adjacent land as it sees fit at the pre-war valuation without regard to the owners' idea of the new value given it by the coming of thousands of people to the neighborhood. The unearned increment is there, but it is safely in the nation's pocket; and the nation, unlike a private landowner, charges rents only on a basis of costs, and not the maximum that the well-paid munitions worker can stand.

SANDBY GREEN-A GLIMPSE OF A NEW ENGLISH VILLAGE FOR MUNITION WORKERS

Five hundred million dollars is the approximate amount that England has spent on these garden cities already, and so efficiently do they stabilize labor and multiply output that more and more of them are being built. The labor turnover-the incessant coming and going of restless, dissatisfied workers-has, in these cases, disappeared as a problem. Labor has no use for high wages if living costs are equally high. What labor wants is more margin, and so England holds down the amount of tribute that labor must pay to land. The annual cost of the patch of ground that the munitions worker's little house occupies is not its inflated town value, but is much nearer the value it had as a worthless patch of the original empty, wind-swept

moor.

English labor has grasped the principle and sees the vision of a slumless and tenementless age. It is demanding that when the great armies flood back across the Channel, and the period of unemployment and readjustment sets in, the Government shall spend billions for no less than a million new dwellings to rehouse the working class of England. Tory business men agree, for it will make English labor so efficient that England can conquer the commercial world.

The Government's investment in present and future garden cities will presumably be recouped after the war by selling them off, not to individuals, but to the municipal governments or to non-profit co-partnership tenants societies for group ownership, which plans are already familiar in Letchworth and the English garden suburbs.

In America we have plunged headlong and heedlessly through a costly period of high labor turnover into an acute housing crisis. Plants and shipyards have been hiring annually five and ten times their normal number of employees in frenzied and vain attempts to maintain full forces. At Hog Island they are hiring 20,000 men a month to maintain a force of 20,000. The average turnover at all the shipyards is six hundred per cent a year. The Newport News shipyards have been running at half capacity, for the workmen who came could find no decent place to live. Shacks and crowded boarding-houses and beds that work three shifts a day will not long suffice for good workmen, despite high wages. At Philadelphia the Emergency Fleet Corporation started the gigantic Hog Island yards, and then, having let it be known that these would attract some eight thousand workmen, prepared to build homes for them, and went shopping for land without power of condemnation. Naturally the landowners saw them coming and prices went skyward (inspired perhaps. by the example of the farmer at the Du Ponts' new town at Hopewell, Virginia, who sold a piece of his $10,000 farm for $250,000.)

At Wilmington, Bridgeport, and elsewhere local housing corporations have been formed with local capital. They have made plans, picked out the land, and asked for Federal loans, and in some cases seem likely to secure them. They expect to sell off the new houses as promptly as may be possible. Construction costs are so high that quick sales are not anticipated, but the pressure for accommodations will remain serious, and, although the housing companies are not organized for profit so much as public-spiritedly to attack an insistent local problem,

yet their dividends are not limited and the Government has no power to buy out their interest at cost, although they are free to buy out the Government's. In cases where the houses are to be scattered through or around an existing city such an unguarded policy will not matter, for the unearned increments of fand value will be dissipated indistinguishably over neighboring and downtown areas and probably cannot be conserved.

But some of these great housing developments are to be new towns and suburbs, self-contained and complete, with their own business sections, created by simple fiat on broad tracts of remote meadow-land where cows are grazing to-day. Six hundred to seven hundred dollars per capita is the land value frequently reached in such industrial communities, but the land, with its improvements, such as streets, sewers, lights, and water, will cost only a fraction of that. Under a wide-open policy of selling off lots or houses and lots as soon as the cost can be recouped, the difference between the cost and the ultimate value will escape. That is what happened at Gary, Indiana, 'where the United States Steel Corporation created a city in 1906 and sold off lots at cost, and the law of the unearned increment in that rapidly growing town scattered over $22,000,000 in pure gifts of rising land value indiscriminately and haphazardly among various lucky or shrewd early buyers.

Needless to say, no land speculators should be allowed to get into these new Government towns to exploit the incoming shipbe allowed to resell or sub-let to other workers at a profit as the yard workers. Neither should workers who buy or lease houses sub-letting prohibited, and the rents that are paid must be kept values rise. Occupancy should be limited to shipyard workers, down to the minimum necessitated by costs, as in England. If any loophole is left for capitalizing the unearned increments, high rents will nullify high wages, workers will begin taking boarders, and the old evils of congestion, high labor turnover, and dissatisfaction will reappear, to the detriment of the armies that wait in France.

in the Labor Department with an inadequate appropriation to A central Federal housing authority has now been created build houses where needed, whether for Army, Navy, or contributory industries. It has power to condemn the lands it needs and operate the properties. It will doubtless find it advisable to work through subordinate commissions of local public-spirited business men in the various places, such as those who have come forward already in the proposed housing corporations. It should build, not merely houses, but stores, churches, theaters, dance halls, libraries, and other attributes of normal, wholesome life, without which labor-particularly sober, high-grade laborcannot be attracted except at excessive cost. The present policy per cent, the Government loaning the other eighty per cent on seems to be to insist on the securing of local capital for twenty first mortgage. Local capital objects that present costs are abnormal and the future of these towns uncertain, so it asks for protection and ought to get it. While the debate on such points proceeds in a vain desire to save money, the country is paying heavily in delay and expensive manufacturing difficulties. English experience indicates that we must come in the end to complete Government financing and control. After the war, and after the readjustment of the industries to

which American corporations occasionally create as incidents to the establishment of new plants. Its programme is applicable to some of these new ship-building and munitions-housing projects. To the enterprise of an architect, Mr. F. L. Ackerman, of this Committee, you are indebted for the story of England's doings as reviewed above, and for the pictures, which are the first that have been allowed to go outside of England. This Committee is trying quietly to get the English principle of close land control accepted here in time to affect the great main housing programme. Luckily, there is considerable vision and imagination these days in Washington.

a peace basis, the excess costs of the houses due to haste and war conditions should be written off as a cost of war and the properties sold unbroken to the communities themselves, acting through non-profit local land companies. Thus the annual value of the increments can be conserved for the common benefit either in the form of abnormally low rents, conditions considered, or in the form of extra community revenue. A Committee on New Industrial Towns, composed of tax and real estate authorities, with Mr. Lawson Purdy, of New York, as Chairman, has been working for two years on the problems of anticipating and conserving unearned increments of land value in the new communities

All of
my life I have loved where I was not loved,
And always those whom I did not love loved me:
Only the God who made my wild heart knows
Why this should be.

Oh, you are strange, inscrutable, and proud! I cannot prove you though I try and try. You'll keep my love alive and wondering Until I die.

T

HE Girl Scout movement, now six years old, has become a vigorous and significant expression of National spirit. In 509 cities and towns of the United States trim, khakiclad girls have become familiar figures in every community demonstration. Through their Scout activities, through participation in the actual business of life cut down to the capacity of youth, these girls are being trained for citizenship in a school of service, a school that stresses the rights of the individual less than his responsibilities.

Girl Scouts are the American outgrowth of the Girl Guides of England. Though springing from the same source as the Boy Scouts of America, and sharing the same ideals of citizenship and service, the two organizations, on the advice of Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the father of both, were made entirely distinct. When Sir Robert organized the Boy Scouts, he found among those seeking membership no less than six thousand girls. To or

ganize them he called on his sister, Miss Agnes Baden-Powell, who formed them into troops after the same general plan as the Boy Scouts, and called them Girl Guides. Interested with Miss Baden-Powell in this work was Mrs. Juliette Low, an American woman long resident in England. When, in 1912, she returned to her native city of Savannah, she was urged both by Miss Baden-Powell and her brother, Sir Robert, to form troops of American Girl Guides. She formed the troops after the plan suggested, but the matter of a name was taken out of her hands. The girls insisted on being called Girl Scouts, and Girl Scouts they became, and are so incorporated in Washington.

Mrs. Low is still the active President of the organization, with Mrs. Woodrow Wilson as Honorary President. The National headquarters are at 527 Fifth Avenue, New York City.

The plan of the organization is simple and elastic and essentially democratic. Wherever eight girls of about the same age

may be gathered together the Girl Scout plan fits. It is equally appealing to girls in boarding-schools and in institutions, in fashionable suburban communities and in crowded city districts. Some of its most interesting troops are in institutions for deaf and blind and for tubercular children, where it has given these unfortunates a new point of contact with normal life.

psy

In the application of the principles of scouting to the chology of the young girl it has been recognized that boys like to be boys, while girls do not like to be girls. They are fundamentally little women, and the surest way to win their interest is to open to them the pursuits of women so modified as to insure to them the rewards of achievement. Every activity of the Girl Scout programme connects directly with adult life. The organization accepts the Girl Scout as a responsible member of society, entitled to its rewards. Hard tasks are not sweetened with elaborate ritual, but are accomplished by application and concentration because the results are worth while. The individual good turn, so potent in the Boy Scout plan, is not emphasized with the girls. A good turn done by the troop to the community is the unit of service rather than as individual to individual. Service in the home is emphasized, because the home is the unit of society, and the good home-maker makes the good citizen.

For nearly five years after its modest beginnings in Savannah the Girl Scout movement grew slowly. It succeeded because girls liked it, and because the leaders in recreational work for girls, to whose attention it came, found in it a useful and successful device for holding and focusing the interests of their charges.

In 1915 National headquarters were opened in New York. The organization now attracted the attention of educators seeking an instrument for that difficult process of carrying over the lessons of the primary agencies of education, the school and the Sunday-school, into the daily life of youth. Dr. James E. Russell, Dean of Teachers College, became an officer of the organization and is active in formulating its educational policies and plans. Fellowships for the training of leaders have been established at Teachers College, Boston University, Johns Hopkins University, and New York University, while courses for leaders are given in colleges in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Minneapolis.

The entrance of the United States into the war brought the Girl Scouts their great opportunity to translate their Scout vows of loyalty into patriotic service. The entire organization became a unit for war work. Other young girls might work their honest, earnest little fingers off with grown-up organizations, but Girl Scouts worked as Girl Scouts, and their output was accredited to their own organization. They offered themselves to the Red Cross, and were assigned definite duties by each local chapter.

That these duties were usually the tedious and none too pleasant tasks cheerfully shirked by the grown-ups made no difference to the Girl Scouts. They have picked oakum and swept out work-rooms from one end of the United States to the other. In New York the girls have become sufficiently expert in making surgical dressings to open a Red Cross work-room of their own and to form their own Red Cross auxiliary. Thousands of surgical dressings have been made and shipped. In Philadelphia, where there are more than a hundred troops, the girls organized a bazaar to raise money for a wool fund. The entire proceeds, $800, have been expended for wool for Girl Scout knitting. Three hundred and fifty Philadelphia Girl Scout mufflers are already in France.

The Food Administration was quick to recognize the usefulness of the girls. Twenty-seven school Girl Scouts of Washington have been trained as home demonstrators, and have pledged their Saturdays and holidays to the work of demonstrating canning methods and war cookery in clubs, churches, schools, etc. Mr. Hoover himself approved a special Girl Scout pledge card, whereby candy and soda-water were cheerfully and solemnly laid on the sacrificial altar.

Without previous plans and without hope of reward Girl Scouts nevertheless were so active in the last Liberty Loan campaign, actually selling close to half a million dollars' worth of bonds, to say nothing of distributing tons of literature and running countless errands for countless committees, that their efforts won them the offer of official recognition for the next campaign of this kind.

Whenever a girl's size war job has offered itself, the Girl Scouts have taken it on. Their scrap-books and puzzle cards have gone to hundreds of convalescent hospitals in France; their packages have decked soldiers' Christmas trees from Maine to California; their trench candles, thousands upon thousands of them, have lighted dugouts the length of the Allied lines.

The organization of the Girl Scouts, acting under the direction of the Army and Navy Commission on Training Camp Activities, has found an urgent field for usefulness in the towns adjacent to the camps. "The best service you can do," said the Army authorities, "is to keep the girls out of the camps." This is the task the Girl Scout leaders have set themselves. The work is now fully organized in the vicinity of Camp Devens, Massachusetts, and is being started near other camps. It puts into the life of the village girl so vigorous and constructive a programme of definite service and gives her a code of honor so completely within her comprehension that she has neither time nor desire to loiter around the camps. In this, as in every other activity, Girl Scouts serve "America First "in terms of everyday living.

P

RESIDENT WILSON is his own interpreter. So far as I know, he has never requested any one to act as a mediator between his mind and the Nation; and, so far as I know, none has presumed to arrogate to himself that high function. To do so would be superfluous and impertinent. Fortunately, the President has the most perfect vehicle imaginable he is amply able to translate his thoughts and aims and purposes to the people in terms no one need misunderstand. And, like any great master of utterance, he possesses the art of verbal concealment. Every advantage is his; he may choose his own time, place, and occasion; no one can divert him into the bypaths of petty controversy; when he decides to speak, the entire world pauses to listen. We may assume that at any given time we know all that he wishes us to know, and that it lies before our eyes in the precise form the President wished it to have. If there is anything which pertains to the President's activity or quiescence in the present condition of world affairs that we do not know, it is because he has willed that we should not know it. Although President Wilson does not need an interpreter, the people of America do. There are limits to this office, for no one man can know intimately the thoughts of one hundred million men and women. But in a democracy, when there is a unanimity of deep conviction public opinion has little difficulty in making itself heard. For some time I have missed no opportunity of learning the mind of the people. In the grocery stores of remote villages, on trains, among club-men, in financial circles, in mills and factories, among the clergy and church members-wherever men and women would talk I have listened. I have read the country newspapers and the press of the great cities, trade papers, religious journals, humorous periodicals, and magazines. I have worked hard in the Liberty Loan, Y. M.C. A., Red Cross, and Community War Work campaigns, and then I have seen patriotism at white heat. And this is my conviction: that never before have the people of America been so fused by the fiery passion of a great purpose as they are to-day.

During the Revolutionary period there were Tories and loyalists in abundance, and among them men of such caliber and standing as seriously to embarrass George Washington. In the Civil War Lincoln had all of the South against him, a fringe of border States of dubious allegiance, and even in the North there were Copperheads a-plenty. Except for the aliens within our borders, President Wilson has had the country with him from the moment he broke off diplomaticrelations with Germany. The loyalty has been intense, unanimous, and uncalculating. In his address to Congress, April 2, 1917, on the necessity of war with Germany, President Wilson said:

It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things we have always carried nearest our hearts-for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.

To this appeal the Nation responded with a unanimity that was awesome. The American thrilled to the word dedicate. They knew full well what the word meant; Lincoln cut it deep into the very heart of the Nation in his Gettysburg address, using it no less than five times in that brief but immortal speech. If there is one word in the English language which expresses the ultimate spiritual consciousness of America, it is dedication.

When the President asked for men, the best we had to give,

he received 1,500,000 without a murmur of dissent. When the President asked for money, the people poured out their billions in taxes and bond subscriptions without a moment of reluctance. When the President asked the people to give up some of their long and deeply cherished rights and privileges, they surrendered them without hesitation in order that they might become available power in the executive hands. And if the President needs more men the people will give another 1,500,000, and following them still another 1,500,000. If the President needs more billions of dollars, the people will double or quadruple the former amounts at any time. If the President needs more power in the executive hands, the people will sanction Congress in surrendering still other long and deeply cherished rights and privileges. Why? Because Lincoln graved the word dedication on the soul of America. The people are dedicated to making the world safe for democracy, to the overthrow of the barbaric German militaristic autocracy, to the righting of the frightful wrongs that have been perpetrated in Europe and Asia by the fiendish ruthlessness of the imperial Hun and his vassals. From April 2, 1917, the people realized, and realized fully, what President Wilson said on April 15 of the same year: "The supreme test of the Nation has come. We must all speak, act, and serve together."

In his Flag Day address, June 14, 1917, Mr. Wilson again gripped the people by the clearness and splendor of his vision, and expressed adequately what the Nation felt:

The war was begun by the military masters of Germany, who proved to be also the masters of Austria-Hungary. These men have never regarded nations as peoples, men, women, and children of like blood and frame as themselves, for whom governments existed and in whom governments had their life. They have regarded them merely as serviceable organizations which they could by force or intrigue bend or corrupt to their own purpose...

Austria is at their mercy. It has acted, not upon its own initiative or upon the choice of its own people, but at Berlin's dictation ever since the war began. Its people now desire peace, but cannot have it until leave is granted from Berlin. The so-called Central Powers are, in fact, but a single Power.

Americans believed that the President spoke the truth with exactness, June 14, 1917, and they believe that his words are just as true at the close of February, 1918. In his Flag Day address, from which I have just quoted, the President also said:

The military masters under whom Germany is bleeding see very clearly to what point Fate has brought them. If they fall back or are forced back an inch, their power both abroad and at home will fall to pieces like a house of cards. It is their power at home they are thinking about now more than their power abroad. It is that power which is trembling under their very feet; and deep fear has entered their hearts. They have but one chance to perpetuate their military power, or even their controlling political influence. If they can secure peace now with the immense advantages still in their hands which they have up to this point apparently gained, they will have justified themselves before the German people; they will have gained by force what they promised to gain by it: an immense expansion of German power, an immense enlargement of industrial and commercial opportunities. Their prestige will be secure, and with their prestige their political power.

No words could have expressed more adequately the beliefs of the American people in June, 1917, no words could more adequately express the beliefs of the American people to-day. They believe that Austria has no initiative of its own, but that it acts solely at the dictation of Berlin. So that if Count Czernin seems to be more moderate and reasonable than Chancellor von Hertling, it is because Berlin wished Austria to play that role for the benefit of Germany. Therefore to flirt with Vienna is simply Columbia making eyes at a manikin which bills and coos when Berlin pulls the strings. After Germany's latest violated pact with Russia the American people believe that no one can play that game without being betrayed by the Iscariot