HOW TO SAVE THE EMBANKMENT.
THE History of the Thames Embankment may be written in three chapters,—How it was made, how it is being paid for, and how it has been spoiled. The first of these belongs to a past which already seems remote. The second is in the historic present, for the money was raised by a loan which is still outstanding. The third has been contributed without any warning by the Metropolitan District Railway. The ratepayer has now the double annoyance of seeing the Embankment disfigured by the railway ventilators, and of being called upon twice a year to pay for making what the Railway Company are bent upon disfiguring. Of all the uses to which "the lungs of London " have from time to time been turned, this is surely the strangest. First of all, we set apart certain spaces on the Embankment, which are to be planted and laid out as gardens for the enjoyment of the vast mass of people who live within a mile or so of the northern bank of the River. Next, we watch to see how far this benefit is valued by those on whom it is conferred. And then, when the crowds that fill every available spot on a summer's afternoon and evening have made this point perfectly clear, we undo a great part of our work, by allowing the District Railway to pick out these very oases for the discharge of all the poisonous vapours which its engines can generate in a journey round London. The objec- tions to the ventilators are three, any one of which ought to be fatal to them. To begin with, they take up space in a part of London where space is peculiarly precious. The Gardens on the Thames Embankment are not a foot too large for the end they have to discharge. More ground, rather than less, is wanted to make them what they ought to be, and now an appreciable fraction of their area has been taken by the Railway for its own use. In the second place, the buildings occupying the space of which the public have been legally robbed promise to be singularly ugly, and they will so dominate the gardens in which they are placed, that the eye will find it difficult to fix itself on anything else. An oblong mass of yellow brickwork, chastely roofed with grey slate, does not seem to have many elements of fascination ; but for all that, it may supply the one impression which the visitor will carry away from the Embankment Gardens. Nor is it only the eye that will have reason to complain. The nose, unless it is the victim of a diseased passion for the fumes of sulpburetted hydrogen, will suffer at least as much. To sit in the neighbourhood of a ventilator will be to inhale a gush of poisonous vapour every time that a train passes, and as trains pass on an average about every ninety seconds, the discharge will be practically con- tinuous. This is the conception we form to ourselves of making the most of a great public improvement.
Now, how did all this come about? Immediately by the opera- tion of an Act of Parliament. The District Company have the
• law on their side. They could not have opened a single venti- lator, if they had not first come to Parliament for leave, and only last Session Parliament gave them leave. So far, there- fore, the District Railway may consider itself the injured party. It has robbed no one and interfered with no one's comfort, without first explaining to both Houses what it proposed to do, and asking if, after thus unbosoming itself, it might go and do it. If we push inquiry a little further back, and ask how this leave came to be given, the answer is that the blunder is due partly to the carelessness of those who were concerned in opposing the Bill, and partly to the imperfect publicity given to Private Bills, even when they affect considerable public interests. The Corporation of London and the Metro- politan Board of Works were both hostile to the Bill, and it might have been thought that two such powerful bodies, fight- ing, so to say, for their own hearths, would have had no difficulty in throwing it out. Nor would they have had, if they had taken the precaution of making the public understand what it was that the Bill proposed to do. There should have been meetings at the Mansion House or the Guildhall ; the Members for the City and for Westminster should have been plied with deputations ; the President of the Board of Trade should have been given no peace, until he consented to oppose the Bill at every stage. Not one of these expedients seems to have been resorted to The Bill was opposed, but it was opposed in such a milk-and-water fashion that it passed
without difficulty or investigation. The blame of this extraordinary oversight must be borne to some extent by the present arrangements for the conduct of Private-bill legis- lation. It is the merest chance whether the public know any- thing of what is going on in the Committee-rooms. Some- times the proceedings get a line or two of notice in a cornea of the morning papers, and we learn that the room was cleared, and that on the readmission of the public the Chairman announced that the Committee were of opinion that the pre- amble of the Bill had or had not been proved. What seems to be wanted is that when the Committee have finished their examina- tion of a Bill, the Chairman should draw up a short statement of the object of the Bill, and that this statement should be printed with the votes. In the case of the great majority of private Bills with which no public object is in any way asso- ciated, one line of explanation would be sufficient. That this Bill confirms certain family arrangements, and that this other provides for the purchase of certain land by a railway, would ordinarily be an adequate report for a Chairman to make. But in the case of the Ventilators on the Embankment, it would have been his duty to set out the number and size of the ventilators it was proposed to set up, and the precise places at which it was proposed to place them. In this way, the public would have had a fair warning of what the Railway proposed to do ; and though it is conceivable that no one would have read the Chairman's statement when it was printed, it is almost certain that it would have attracted the attention of some Member of Parliament or some journalist, and have been made the text of either a speech or an article.
The immediate question, however, is how the mischief can be prevented, now that it is so nearly done. If the Act arm- ing the District Railway with power to disfigure the Embank- ment at its pleasure were a public Act, or if the Railway Company had begun work in the winter, instead of in the spring, there would by comparison have been no difficulty. In the one case, a public Bill could have been introduced, simply repealing the obnoxious provision, and compensating the Rail- way for any expense it had actually incurred in reliance on the leave given last Session. In the other case, the same end would have been attained by the introduction of a private Bill. As it is, however, the House of Commons is opposed, and rightly opposed, to mixing up two distinct branches of its work, and introducing a public Bill to repeal a private one ; while it is not now possible, under the Standing Orders, to introduce a private Bill during the present Session. Unless, therefore, some exception is permitted to these two regulations, nothing can be done for another year. As a great part of the work is still unfinished, in spite of the rapidity with which the Railway Company have pushed it for- ward, this delay would be extremely costly. The difference in the compensation money would be the difference between the cost of an unfinished work, and the cost of a completed work. The best solution' therefore, that can be suggested is that the Chairman of the Metropolitan Board of Works should move to suspend the Standing Orders, so as to allow of a Bill to repeal the clause under which the District Railway are acting being at once introduced. If any one who has seen the handiwork of the Company really thinks well of it, he would then have an opportunity of being beard. If, as is more probable, the Bill would be carried through both Houses by acclamation, Parliament would only have to congratulate itself on its second thoughts being wiser than its first. Only, it is important to bear in mind that every day that Sir James Hogg delays to take this coarse, the Ratepayers of London will have to pay a larger sum by way of compensation.
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