198 City Homes on Country Lanes 



pitiable to see millions of farmers, long established on 

 the land, groping their way to forms of cooperation 

 which they have found utterly necessary to their eco- 

 nomic existence, and which the right sort of engineering 

 might readily have provided for them at the beginning, 

 long before they got into trouble. In fact, it could 

 have been done far better in the beginning than at the 

 later stages, when a thousand obstacles have arisen, 

 and a thousand evil ways have hardened into custom. 



In a garden-city settlement, I would carry the spirit 

 of engineering still further — even into the kitchen and 

 dining-room. If our people are to live luxuriously, it 

 is not enough for them to know how to produce all the 

 materials for a luxurious living; they must also know 

 how to put them together. Take so simple a matter as 

 a salad : Anybody with a garden can grow nearly all 

 the components of a good salad ; but, there are salads 

 and salads ; some hardly fit to eat, others that are 

 food for the gods. Making a good salad is an art. 



I recall a wonderful dish I once had in a San Fran- 

 cisco restaurant. I sent for the chef and asked him 

 if anybody could make that kind of a salad if he had 

 the ingredients and knew how. "Sure!" he said, with 

 an expansive smile. "Well," I replied, "if a lot of peo- 

 ple who raise these things should send for you and 

 pay you a good fee, would you show them how to do 

 it?" "Sure I would!" he replied. Now, the man is a 

 scientific engineer in the matter of making salads. 

 Isn't it absurd that a lot of nice men and women, having 

 the material at hand, and lacking only the art of mak- 

 ing the most of it, should go on eating commonplace 



