TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 783 



leaving therety an enormous debt upon the city. But so enormous also had been 

 the subsequent value-increase that he was warranted in saying that Paris could 

 have been successfully reconstructed as a private enterprise by holding for an 

 adequate term to the sites, much in the way he now proposed for London. 



Having stated principles, tlie author then passed to details. In the first place 

 he must be helped by a special Act of Parliament, to enable the Government to deal 

 with and authorise a trust when of adequate resource and responsibility. With- 

 out this special facility no body of responsible and busy men would attempt such a 

 work, and this Act, whUe they were about it, he would make general and not 

 merely for London, so that public-spirited persons elsewhere might institute similar 

 trusts. The proposed trust to be upon a scale of adequate resource, should have ten 

 millions of capital to start with ; but this could take the convenient form of a 

 small paid-up, and a large liability, capital. The advantage of this form, as much 

 successful experience had shown, was that, while a dividend might be large and 

 satisfactory as compared with the paid capital, it yet weighted the concern with 

 only a small charge as upon the whole capital. This plan answered well where 

 there was confidence in the undertaking. And responsible shareholding would 

 still be secured by making the shares of exceptionally large amount. 



But this form of the capital would involve large borrowing from the public, and 

 in order to do this cheaply (for it was everything to tide over, at lowest cost, the 

 considerable interval till natural increment became effective), the trust would 

 claim a contingent rating liability as additional security for its loan issues. The 

 ratepayers, protected by the trust's capital and judicious business procedure, would 

 have only a nominal liabihty. Under this concession the trust's dividends must be 

 by agreement with the Government. 



Then followed conditions or limits to the full powers of action given to the 

 trust. No step could be taken without approval, or in face of the veto of Govern- 

 ment or municipality. Hostility on their part was not to ba even dreamed of in 

 this beneficial work. The Board of Management would include a representative of 

 the Government, of the Corporation, and of the Board of Works. A further con- 

 dition would be that, in its possibly large expropriations, the trust should, as far as 

 practicable, offer siteholders, on fair agency terms, the option of co-operation 

 instead of expropriation. This seems only fair, where the object is not such dis- 

 turbing expropriation, but improvement. 



Finally, Mr. Westgarth, in commending his project to favourable attention, 

 said that he was ambitious to invite the help of the very highest London names in 

 forming his Board, and thus alike to inspire public confidence in an enterprise 

 somewhat novel in character, and to do full justice to a project which contained all 

 the possibilities of the grandest and most beneficent of business enterprises. 



6. On the Application of Physical Science to Economics. 

 By Patrick Geddes. 



The present isolation of economic from physical and biological studies, in spite of 

 the clear dependence of the social sciences on the preliminary ones, is to be accounted 

 for, not on rational, but simply on temporai-y grounds, that of the press of detailed 

 labour upon every specialist. Yet these sciences are needed on every hand. The 

 population question is a strictly biological one ; so too that of competition, and even 

 of individuahsm vejsus socialism, which largely comes down to a dispute between 

 the advocates of natural and artificial selection respectively. Progress especially 

 needs interpretation in terms of evolution — i.e., the popular idea of progress as lyincr 

 essentially in quantity of wealth and in number of population needs thorough re- 

 placement by the scientific one, that of the improved average individual quality of 

 the organisms composing the society, and of the material surroundings upon which 

 their evolution depends. 



Foreign though such views may nowadays seem to economists, it was in this 

 way that the science actually arose : the original French ' Physiocratic ' school was 

 one of naturalists and physicians, and the subsequent character of political economy 



