ABSTRACT
The cult of the country as the regenerative bed of society had become a very fissiparous social fad in the closing years of the century. Its addicts needed an authoritative revised version of the old gospel. This was provided by Ebenezer Howard, in Tomorrow: A Peaceful Plan to Real Reform (1898) which offered ‘the Master Key’ to contemporary problems: a Garden City of 30,000 people on a 6,000-acre estate of six wards, combining the benefits of both town and country life. A cluster of such cities separated by belts of open country, 3,000 yds. wide would, Howard prophesied, shrink the existing cities to some 58,000 inhabitants apiece. Howard believed that the ‘new sense of freedom and joy pervading the hearts of the people’, would result in a ‘just system of land tenure for one representing the selfishness which we hope is passing away’. Like most enthusiasts, he believed that his plan would ‘silence the harsh voice of anger, and . . . awaken the soft notes of brotherliness and goodwill’. 600 It would also, he added, show the ‘true limits of Government interference, ay, and even the relations of man to the Supreme Power’. ‘In the search for truth’, Howard wrote in a footnote outlining his intellectual debts, ‘men’s minds run in the same channels.’ These channels were Herbert Spencer’s land scheme (itself a mutation of the Spencean plan), Buckingham’s model city, as well as numerous others.
