MR. TOMKINS (_of the London Trades Council_) said:
If before any person was allowed to serve on our different public bodies, he should be required to attend a course of lectures such as those given by Professor Geddes on civics, that would surely be a means of developing his social interests, and would tend to eliminate that self-interest which too often actuated public men. There was nothing more difficult than for workmen to-day to be able to take larger views. The workman's whole business was now so different from what is was in the days of the arts and crafts guilds of the Middle Ages; they now found him ground down into some little division of industry, and it was quite impossible for him to work in his own way. Thus he got narrow-minded, because concentrated on some minor process. He was kept at work with his nose to the mill the whole time, and it became too exhausting for him to try and take these larger views of life. He often thought of the amount of talent and energy and practical beauty which was wasted in our workshops to-day. Referring to the Garden Cities of this country and the United States, Mr. Tomkins said the idea of getting great Trusts to use their money in a social spirit, and not merely to get the workers tied to their mills, was really something which opened out a vista of grand possibilities in the future; but if any movement was to be successful it would be necessary to teach the great masses of workers, and to create a real sound social public opinion amongst them.
Professor Geddes, in replying to the discussion, said he entirely agreed with the point made by Mr. Swinny, and he should just like to correct what he had said in his lecture by reference to what he meant by a civic museum. In Edinburgh, he had in his museum a large room, with a geographical model [Page: 118] of the old town with its hill-fort, and so on; and he hung round this maps and diagrams of historical and geographical details. On the opposite side of the room, he had a symbol of the market-cross, which stood for the centre of its municipal life, of its ideals and independence of environment. Around it was grouped what represented the other side of the city; and here he might answer another point, and say that they could never settle the great philosophical controversy of determinism and free-will. They would always incline when young to the novel of circumstance, and later, to the novel of character, but they should always feel that life was a game of individual skill with interfering circumstances. These diagrams of his were only the page split. On the one side, he meant to push to the extreme the idea that the place makes us, and on the other side, that we make the place. By what process do men struggle towards the selection of their ideals? They find themselves within the grasp of their environment, their whole heritage of culture, of good and ill, the whole tradition of the past; but they must select certain elements of these--the elements that seem to them good, and so they might escape from the manner of the city. Pointing to a drawing of the old Scotch bawbee, Professor Geddes said it was not a very dignified symbol of the coinage of the world, but let them mark how it had on the one side the hammerman at his work, with his motto "_Beat deus artem_," and, on the other side, a larger legend, with the eagle of the empire and the lamb of Saint John.