much; but if there is no outdoor space where children can play, how can their little limbs develop, their cheeks grow bright-how can the delicate mother get a little rest from their noisy game, or the strong one clean her room or cook the dinner without interruption? Where on the sultry August days can the convalescent sit or lie in the fresh air? Where can the man sit and smoke his pipe? What escape is there from the narrow court, heated almost like an oven; and how shall drunkenness and quarrelling be avoided on the crowded doorsteps? I fear the garden attached to every house has, in London, become a thing of the past. It is the more incumbent on us to provide in every district as many public gardens, within near reach of the people's homes, as can be secured. It is most important for them to be near enough to be used by infants and mothers; also, if they are scattered, they have the added advantage of opening out breathing spaces, most valuable as giving better air to the blocks around. Yet there is no doubt whatever that the cost of proper supervision is a very grave consideration; it is enhanced greatly if it has to be provided for many scattered spaces. The size and positions of these smaller gardens or playgrounds therefore require much consideration. As a matter of fact it has been decided mainly by circumstances. So little had the need of them been realised until London was covered with high houses, that they had to be secured when and where opportunity arose, and for our people's central smaller gardens we are indebted mainly to the provisions of churchyards for quite other purposes long ago. Most of these have been in the last twenty years redeemed from dirt and neglect, and rendered available for our people. The second great supply of smaller playgrounds has come from the London School Board. These are, however, I fear, still not available in the playtime of the children, as much as one hopes they may be in times to come; but at the least they afford fresh air between morning and afternoon school. They would no doubt be more used and more full of life were it not that supervision is absolutely needed, that firm and sympathetic supervision is difficult to obtain, that it is costly if it is not voluntary, that, if voluntary, it is not always strong and orderly, and that we have not recognised its importance. I can imagine few more useful undertakings for younger workers with character, spirit and will than that of trying to render small London playgrounds fuller of life for the children, orderly and happy by the introduction of games, of drill, of outdoor processions and festivals, and of gardening. Such volunteers ought to train themselves in Kindergarten or other schools, to obtain the habit of command over a group of children, and to arrange for having the power of admitting to the games a selected number. Then the children's outdoor time would be as happy and educational as that in school, and they would not be tempted in the degrading, but exciting, street to unlearn the

lessons of the Board School. For remember, these little London grounds are surrounded with high buildings; few plants flower in them, paint soon gets discoloured, and they are apt to look ugly and feel dull to the excitable young Londoners. What they need to render them attractive is life, brightness, discipline, something going on, and such order that things provided for common use may be available. I know a London playground where there are swings which have to be taken down until some young lady goes in who can prevent the infants getting injured by running in front of them, but, directly they are hooked up and she presides, the little place is full of animated life. I have seen a see-saw crowded with children, weighed down and quite immovable because there was no one to decide who should have the first turn on it, and who the second. I have seen an empty garden filled by eager children gathered from foul courts in a few minutes by a young lady going in with a basket full of daisies and needles and thread for the children to make wreaths, or with pipes and soap-and-water for soap bubbles.

Then I am quite sure that attempts ought to be made to get certain of the girls and boys interested in gardening. I have seen the small space round a London church divided into little gardens for Sunday scholars, each plot bright with its special flowers. In Red Cross Garden, in Southwark, I often long for some one to see to such gardening classes or groups. It is very curious to contrast there the flowerlessness of the public garden with the floweriness of some private ones quite near. I used to think it was wholly the air that made us so colourless, till I was able to arrange for some separate gardens at the back of three or four cottages quite near. I found soon growing in them nearly every kind of common vegetable, in infinitesimal quantities certainly, but vigorous healthy plants, and hollyhocks, sunflowers, evening primroses in full and abundant bloom. I am sure if some young ladies would set themselves to it, some such healthy happy work might be done in gardens like this in Southwark. But it would need the sacrifice of late summer afternoons, perhaps of Saturday afternoons, and must be done in loyal and thoughtful co-operation with the regular caretaker.

I will not enlarge here on the joy or importance of May festivals, flower-shows, outdoor music and processions, nor will I speak of the value of the roofed but open playgrounds for showery weather. I ought to point out that these smaller areas are divided into: first, the playground proper, with asphalte, gymnastic apparatus-ugly, perhaps, but to the child delightful, because of the freedom possible where there is little that can be injured; and, secondly, the garden proper, fitter for the old, the sickly, the infant, a sort of outdoor sittingroom, a parish gathering place for outdoor festival or party, much prettier and needing more care in some ways. Both kinds of openspace are needed. It is well in arranging a ground to decide bravely

air

which of the two objects is being aimed at, so as not to diminish the usefulness of the ground, if small, by trying to make it serve both needs.

Of the parks and metropolitan commons the use is manifest. If the small gardens and playgrounds meet the wants of the mother, the infant, the aged, and of the stronger portion of the community in the shorter times of rest-dinner-hour or late summer evening after work—these larger and usually further-off spaces are useful for the elder girls and lads as well as for grown-up people on the days they can get away from work for longer times-Saturday and Sunday afternoons, school holidays, and suchlike occasions.

With regard to the management of these larger spaces, especially on the outskirts of London, a very general and deep-rooted desire has of late years become manifest in the public that some of the land acquired for them should be preserved in its natural state-wood, or common, or marshy pool. I believe this desire will have to be met, but it is not easy; the adaptations absolutely necessary for public use require to be considered, but this should be done by some one who really cares for the natural beauty. I believe an objectlesson would be more helpful to the local authorities than general statements. Many of them grant the principle, but I do not believe they will easily find a practical application of it. I think one key to the solution of it which it may be useful here to suggest, is that the trustees of the ground must realise that their public is a various one, and that every acre cannot be made available for every individual's taste. The cricketer will always like the flat field; the ordinary sociable man will like the neighbourhood of the carriages, gas and crowd; the born Londoner will prefer wide asphalte walks; while there is a public, and I believe a growing one, which wants a wood walk, even if it be sometimes a little muddy, which likes the silence of a hill-top, and a marsh for the wild flowers, and which does not wish irregularities of slope or density of thicket smoothed away. It would be well to let some part be left for each class. One other point I might mention that with regard to enclosure. No one dreams of enclosing Hampstead Heath, Blackheath, or Wimbledon Common, yet all are near centres of population. A great part of their charm is the freedom which their being unenclosed gives : they look unfettered, you can gain access to them or leave them when you like. This disperses the crowd, and makes it more possible to walk on the grass, because there are no restricted lines of walk. Yet our local authorities throw up their hands in horror at a proposition to leave unfenced any newly acquired suburban common, wood, or hill, and we have the absurdity of huge expense incurred to fence two sides of what is now Hampstead Heath, the other two being wholly open, and of country places left quite unfenced till they become public property, and then strictly fenced, so that residents

have to go a long way to a gate where formerly they gained access opposite their house or street. Also if and where the enclosure must be, can it not in the suburbs be what Robinson calls the living fence'? Holly, beech, hawthorn, are they not better than those eternal iron railings?

I fear that the second point our new map suggests is that, as when the earlier one was made there was not much more space to be procured in the four-mile radius, so now there is not very much more to be had in the six-mile radius. Houses have spread further out as pressure became greater and means of locomotion increased.

While feeling thankful for added means of locomotion, and that more of our people now live away from the most crowded centres, let us direct our attention to the provision of open space in a larger circuit. And perhaps if we are swift and imaginative, we may, by taking the initiative betimes, deal with the outer ring a little more to advantage. Instead of securing at the last moment here and there an area which happens to have been left unbuilt on till it has reached its utmost value, we might secure betimes the areas most essential to us and paths connecting them.

When the father and his lads turn out for a walk, when the mother and father go out with the perambulator, what is trying is the getting to the park or common. If we could have grass or gravel walks some sixty or eighty feet wide, planted with trees and furnished with seats leading from common to common, or circling outside some part of London, or radiating out towards the country, a sort of magnified field path, it would be the greatest boon we could now have for walkers, and such avenues would form shafts of air ventilating the districts they passed through. Such avenues become more difficult to secure the longer they are delayed. In fact, our open spaces are more like the books of the Sibyl than anything I have noticed in life.

We have no such walk that I know of, yet many of the wide roads leading out of London would lend themselves to such an arrangement. The use of such has been recognised in America, and many have been secured.

And now we come to the work a little further afield, to that to which I am myself now devoting my main strength, that is the preserving for the people some parts of the country, and if possible the beautiful, as well as airy, sites. The London work seems to me pretty well floated, and the local authorities are zealous and enlightened. But I am deeply convinced that, if our people are to have access in the years to come to some of the loveliest spots of their native land, if, in the intervals of work, they are to find rest in the beauty and the peace of nature, much will depend on some of us immediately devoting our best strength to seeing that certain places are secured. From the London workman or clerk who spends his

Saturday or Bank Holiday away from London, to the professional man who takes his family for a few weeks away for change, we are all dependent on having some accessible area of unappropriated space, whether it be the New Forest glades, or the Welsh mountains, or Tunbridge Wells, or Haslemere, or the seashore, or the by-ways and commons of Kent and Surrey. Those of us who have not parks or country houses with large gardens, look for lodgings or houses near some open space. Now these accessible places are rapidly decreasing. Private owners find it more difficult to allow tourists into their grounds, sites long open are enclosed and built over, whether it be headlands running out into the sea, or promontories of the Kent and Surrey hills enclosed or occupied by houses and pleasure grounds, or the top of a mountain bought by a speculator, or common illegally enclosed, or roadside waste cribbed, or footpath first concealed and then obstructed-wherever we go, as members of the public, our power of walking and enjoying is being curtailed, and naturally so. follows from this?

What

1. The land, be it common, lammas land, forest, field path, or roadside waste over which there are public rights, must be defended.

2. Sites of exceptional beauty should be bought and dedicated to the people in perpetuity.

How difficult the defence of public right is, how costly, we who are daily striving to uphold such right only know. This would be a sad record indeed if I were to narrate the shamelessness of some of the enclosures made by men who should have a sense of honour; of the cases-good cases-that must be abandoned for want of funds to carry them up to the costly legal tribunals; of the mingled want of public spirit and fear and self-interest which restrict the action of the local authorities. Why public opinion is not more roused against the enclosers, why reforms in the law making defence of public rights cheaper are not insisted on, I cannot tell. But for the moment there are great difficulties in this defence, and these country open spaces are what I feel most urgently call for what strength I can give or rally round me. It seems to me that a critical time has arrived in which it is incumbent on us all to do what in us lies to preserve for our countrymen and women and their children one of the great common inheritances to which as English citizens they are bornthe footpaths of their native country. Through the woods, over the moors, across the fields, by the rivers, and up the hills, as children, how we knew them, these little winding quiet by-ways with all their beauty! Now how they are vanishing! Here closed by Quarter Sessions, sometimes because in the earlier stage the poorer witnesses hardly dared to speak, the richer were friends of the person who wished to close them; the public from a larger area hardly knowing of the decision which had for ever closed to them some lovely walk. There the entrance to them concealed by judicious planting, lodge gate, or