TOPICS OF THE DAY.
GROWTH OF THE METROPOLIS.
THE Parliamentary Paper No. 614 forcibly calls for reflection on the good and evil likely to ensue from the rapid increase of the capital of the empire. According to this return, which appears under the authority of Mr. Mayne the Police Commissioner, the following augmentations in houses, streets, and inhabitants have taken place during the last ten years, within the limits of the Metro- politan Police District ; that is, within the limits of a district ex- tending to any place not exceeding in a direct line fifteen miles from Charing Cross—
Population in 1839, 2,011,056; in 1849, 2,336,960: increase of inhabitants in ten years, 325,904. Number of new houses built since 1839, 64,058; number of new streets formed, 1,642; length of new streets, 200 miles. Number of houses building, July 1849, 3,485.
It may be thought that London cannot grow too big ; that it may continue spreading round interminably, like the famed ban- yan tree of the East, every expansion of whose widening circuit yields grateful shade and shelter ; or that, as the empire itself has acquired greatness by adding colony to colony and dependency to dependency, so may its capital progress, eating up hamlet after
hamlet, viii after vill, and. parish after parish unstintedly. But this would be a delusive forecast of the destiny of the modern Babilon. Like all great consolidations of power, the British capital contains within itself the germs of disintegration. Already it has ceased to be a unity ; it is no longer one and indivisible—a compact burg, of which his worship the Mayor can at night close the gates, raise up the portcullis, and carry home in his pocket the keys of the citizens till next morning. It is more of a constella- tion or cluster of cities each having its separate district and con- ditions of existence—Physical, moral, and political. The East-. end is wholly different from and partly antagonistic to the West- end ; on the opposite flanks, separated by the bed of the Thames, are vast masses of population alien to each other in speech, social culture, and occupation ; next, at two opposite corners of the van parallelogram at the extremities of one diagonal line, are the remote and densely-peopled regions of Bethnal Green and Tothill Fields' while the crossing diagonal has Paddington and St. John's Wood at one end, balanced, and perhaps also partly fed and sustained, by Bermondsey and Rotherhithe at the other end ; all these separate locales of inhabitants being nearly as diversely marked and caste as so many distinct nationalities. So that for any oneness of purpose, any. concerted action or expression of sentiment or inte- rest, the Metropolis has become weaker and less consentaneous in force and outpouring than some of the second-rate or third-rate towns of the kingdom.
A second noticeable element of debility or break-up in the status
of the capital, is of the same nature as that usually held to por- tend death or disorder in an individual by too copious a flow of blood to the head. That the living streams which daily flood into the City have become too numerous and swollen for it to receive —that the heart is really not large enough for its great body and outlying members—are facts patent to all observers. For proof of this oppression on the metropolitan brain it is sufficient to wit- ness the intensity of action in the central confluence of business and traffic at mid-day ; or traverse the adjacent approaches to the whirlpool of the Bank, the Exchange' Insurance-offices, Auction Mart, Cape! Court, and the other foci of sale, transfer, and negotia- tion, and see the utter confusion, and all but impassable throng of men, horses, and vehicles, that choke up the thoroughfares. For all this pressure and jumble from Temple Bar to Aldgate Pump, and from Holborn Bars to the India House, relief is immediately required ; and on a much wider scale ought provision to be made for future increase. Neither the population nor trade of London is likely to diminish, but largely to augment for years, probably ages to come. The world is only just entering with unanimity of impulse on the first stages of peaceful development. From the natural growth of the inland trade of the country, from the in- crease of foreign trade by the progress of industry and capital in the North and East of Europe, in the New World, and in the limit- less regions of Australia and the Polynesian Islands, vast acces- sions must accrue to the crowd and traffic of the capital, for which accommodation must be provided. Neither subways below the streets nor atmospheric ways above them would be adequate to meet the contingency ; for it is not only that the streets would be too few or too narrow for transit, but the central area of the city itself would be too confined a space for its business transactions; and this difficulty could hardly be more easily met in the City nidus than the insular bounds of Great Britain could be ex- tended.
Therefore this urgency, growing out of the further increase of the trade and population of the Metropolis, is likely, by diffusion, to operate a further diversion of its central energies. The precise course the relief needed will take, it may not be easy to foresee. Possibly a new London adjacent to the old may spring up for the aid of its parent ; possibly Smithfield. or Islington may become the site of a new Bank of England, new Royal Exchange, new India House, or new Tones Loyd and Co., Smith, Payne, and Co., or new Colvin and Co., connected with and chiefly managing the trade of the Northern and Eastern counties ; or the foreign com- merce of London and navigation of the river may be relieved, as that of Liverpool and the Mersey are likely to be through Birken- head, by the establishment of an outport nearer to the month of the Thames, at Southend, the Naze, or Margate, for which rail- way communications offer inviting facilities. Whatever direction further progress may necessitate, enough has been indicated to show that London comprises within itself elements of decom- position, or more correctly of distribution and. tendency to form new centres of combination, that may perpetuate its imperial supremacy for an unassignable period of time. Leaving, however, the dim future, let us resume the palpable present, by considering the great interests that have almost im- perceptibly grown with the growth and strengthened with the strength of the Metropolis. Of these, that which is most patent to observance, and most frequently dwelt upon, is thp enormous increase in the ground- rental of the capital, which within a century has expanded into gorgeous affluence the patrician families of Cadogan, Port- man, Grosvenor, Fox, and Northampton ; and East of Temple Bar, has enabled those lords of the soil the City Companies, as trustees of the poor, to riot in sumptuous banquets all the year round. Not dwelling on these familiar facts, we may remark that there are chattel interests that have swollen with the great " wen" into as prodigious development as the realty. Of this order are the banking firms; though some of these, as Child's, Fuller's, and others, are not of fungous or local growth—they struck their roots early, and with other houses have been fed by provincial and colonial progress as well as that which is metro- politan. But the big brewers are strictly native—have drawn their nutriment from the soil, and are to the " manner born." Every new street, square, court, or alley, is as certain to create new demands for butts of Barclay and Bevan, Meux and Co., Whitbread and Co., or Hanbury and Co., as of batches of loaves from the bakers' or joints from the butchers'. The booksellers form a progressive and ancient fraternity : of a" Thomas Long- man, stationer," a predecessor in the great house of the name, we read that he was fined for not serving the office of Sheriff, above a century past. Intimately connected with type is the newspaper interest, which is closely identified with metropolitan demonstra- tions. In the provinces has been working a similar and almost contemporaneous though not so potent an impetus : the Mercury of Leeds, and other old country journals, are the natural adjuncts of the expanding wealth and population of their respective local- ities. But the great Times is the most impressive fact: allowing for the shrewd ability and untiring vigilance with which it has been conducted for half a century, still its prosperousness may be ascribed, in even a greater degree, to the multiplication of metro- politan people and buildings; for it may be safely affirmed that not a ten-pound or a twenty-pound house is erected that does not bring a customer, or at least a fraction of a cus- tomer, to Printing House Square. Indeed, the remark applies to all the magnate interests enumerated, from those of bankers, brewers, and bakers, to booksellers and litterateurs : their rise has been spontaneous, and less of their own shaping of means to ends than of natural causes, as vessels rise by the swell of the tidal flood. Material impulses—procreation and accumulation— have formed the basis and creative orgasm of their grandeur and elevation ; to which may be added the auxiliary adjunct of the long peace, riveted on nations by the victory of Waterloo. All interests, however, have not grown with the growth of Lon- don. Churches and chapels have multiplied ; infant schools, na- tional schools, and schools of the British and Foreign Society, have largely increased ; but there has been no marked increase of great charitable, collegiate, or sanatory foundations. Still, the revenues of the Charterhouse, Christ's Hospital, St. Paul's School, Westminster School, and other old endowments, are known to have enormouely augmented ; and why the objects for which they were intended have not been pari passu multiplied, and what new channels have been found for the dissipation of the surplus incomes accruing, would doubtless open curious avenues for exploration, did time or space permit. The order of clubs too must be passed : indeed, the species or class of interests to which they pertain is not easy to define; and besides, they are too recent and palpable an insertion in the metropolitan polypus to require exposition. So we hasten to a new topic. The sage Lord Burleigh, much perplexed, shook his wise head and wondered how London, with its gathering of some 100,000
people, could be "lodged and fed." That ditch, however, has been
cleared, and the great difficulty now is, less in feeding even twenty times the population of the Elizabethan age, than in having them thoroughly cleaned and aired. But, in the unlooked-for vicissi-
tude, it is singular to remark how material causes, unaided by hu- man thought and contrivance, have operated to our deliverance.
It would naturally have been anticipated, a hundred and fifty or two hundred years past, that the City—that is, the limited com- partment within the ancient walls—would by this time have be- come the greatest concentration of pestilent venom, squalor, and populousness, imaginable. How opposite the actual result 1—as superb and salubrious, more open, and less densely peopled, than any part of the Metropolisl How could anybody have foreseen that the population would be fewer now than at the commencement of the last century, and that narrow, filthy streets, courts, and. alleys, would be replaced by spacious areas, offices, Manchester
warehouses, and noble public edifices? Yet So it is : in 1700 the city of London within the walls contained 139,000 inhabitants; in 1750, 87,000; in 1801, 78,000; in 1821, 58,400; in 1841, 54,626. So that the citizens have been undergoing a gradual displacement or- extrusion outwards from the centre towards the circtunference, to paakeivay for pierce-op and shipping eonneniefitffil,lbt ifdliuhlitfi ?kiddie:tele 1.k-telegraph- houseriAttrdilither needs ,OfCotnniefel, anti ii;lhes. Andsthe eitilis not yet come' S tiled" be Wither evictions antlofartber :local improvements' for' 1:130t', Sowing *ants. That whirl. seems most simently toprest, 'is II -disposal, living and deeds of he-poor. Whecee'fire they to bett5dged, and where are theytcthe buried, are drying tnetropelitaiiciiiesiions. It has long. been /the °pistol:wind] "of ciVilization that it has Conferred little if anrfiene fit on the-labouring clasaess Tbd rich have become richer, more refined and hixurious, happie6 healthier; and More virtuous ; but.the,masseecontintie, as theytnostly have been, Morn, depra- vedsond miserable. -Yet this is a mitigable if not a curable malady, and, we trnit, not among the irreVersible'conditions of humanity. In thnfirst place,- the rich and -edueated should do their duty ; they should.. do those things that pertain not less to'their own se- curity- and wellbeing than to those of their lees fortunate fellow creatures. As a general rule, the poor, if left td themselves, will neither act nor-contrives,. Indigence is-inert—Sightless, thriftless, shiftless. Every age and every country attest these characteris- tics of extreme poverty-. It is not the destitute, as is Often re— Marked, ,but those raised a lift above destitution, that look about theni.--sthat are active, scheming, self-denying, and foreseeing. If thesespostulata are true,----which reflect ion and experience lead us to believe they are,—the course open to the affluent is plain and straightforward. They snustlake charge of the poor, not in the way of misplaced help or sympathy, but of .a dircetine and stirring intelligence. Those who are blind Must follow those who can see, those who are sluggish must yield to the impulse of the more ener- getic. • '
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