Nov. 1907. | THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 377 
he said :—*“ A worker in the town when he leaves his factory 
has no place to go to for amusement except the public-house 
and the music-hall, and his leisure hours are consequently a 
drain upon his physique and his purse. At Bourneville the 
artisan finds in his garden that recreation which in the towns 
he can only obtain in the public-house and the music-hall, 
with the result that his leisure hours, employed as they are 
in the cultivation of his garden, add both to his health and 
the well-being of his family.” 
Mr. George Cadbury said:—‘It is often said that men 
brought up in towns will not take to a garden. The village 
of Bourneville is kept entirely independent of the large works 
adjoining, so that we might try the effects of village life on 
men who had lived in a town; and it has been truly 
marvellous to see how men who have been all their lives, 
perhaps till they were forty or fifty, in a town, take at once 
kindly to a garden. They seem to enjoy it much more than 
the country man who has spent all his life in the country. 
It has been most delightful to see children who have lived 
all their lives in the great dirty city of Birmingham for the 
first time see the marvels of Nature: the seed sown in the 
earth, then—first the blade, and then the ear, and then the 
full corn in the ear. It is like a miracle to them, and many 
townsmen make the very best gardeners. I should like you 
to walk through the streets of Bourneville to-day and see the 
gardens. Thousands of people come out from Birmingham 
to see them, and they are kept in many cases by men who 
have had no education whatever in country life, but nineteen 
out of twenty of them take to gardening as a duck takes to 
water. This shows that it is natural for a man to come in 
contact with the soil.” 
My. W. H. Lever of Port Sunlight fame said:—“ He bore 
testimony, from his experience at Port Sunlight, as Mr. 
Cadbury had done in respect of Bourneville, to the delight 
the workpeople took in their gardens. On a late Bank 
Holiday it was most encouraging to see the bargemen, who 
were regarded in most places as a rough lot, at work in 
their gardens with their children round them; as long as 
they had their gardens to attend to they did not find it 
necessary to seek amusement away from home.” 
This scheme opens up a new vista of hope to our teeming 
