THE ATTRACTIVENESS OF LONDON.
WE wish Mr. Frederic Harrison, when he next lectures, would relax for a moment in his effort to improve the world by making it agree with him, and tell us, with his reasons, his grounds for thinking that human life will become more and more urban. We agree with him fully, though we are of those who deeply regret the change, who are impatient of cities as places of residence, and who see in the severance between men and Nature, and in the loss of the old restful and placid life, the germs of new and abundant evils to mankind. Still, we agree with him, and pending his readiness to perform the task, we are impelled to say, shortly, why. We cannot see any ground for supposing that the tendency of the human race to aggregate itself in clusters of houses built close together, which has manifested itself from the very dawn of history, should be approaching its end, or has produced its most pro- digious results. Why, for example, should not London, which we think so overgrown, grow almost indefinitely bigger P London has been growing for centuries, and is now growing at such a rate that it adds to itself a population as great as that of Norwich every year, or, say, 750,000 every ten years. If it goes on in this way for another century, it will contain eleven millions of people, which seems somehow to everybody to be absurd ; but nobody will tell us precisely why it is absurd, or what is to be the ultimate checking force. Certainly it will not be a legal one. The notion of our forefathers that the growth of London should be stopped by law has long since been abandoned, not only as impracticable, but as an unjust interference with ordinary human liberty. If a man likes to live in London, and will pay his taxes and behave properly while he lives there, to prevent him, or still more to expel him, seems a wantonness of oppression. Nobody nowadays would vote for such a law, or obey it if passed. Certainly, also, the growth will not be stopped by any physical cause. We talk of want of room, but London is not built up to half the height in the air of Paris, or New York, or Old Edinburgh, and has quantities of building-space all round it. The Northern suburbs can be spread out five miles in a direct line before they are out of omnibus-reach ; the West can expand for nearly as many miles; and Eastward, miles of cheap land invite the builder. Even in the South the density might be tripled, and then not exceed the density of Mr. W. H. Smith's most Conservative of boroughs, which Is not so crammed as to be a scandal. Eight millions or more could certainly be housed before any one perceived that distances had become impracticable, and the contrivances for overcoming them are multiplying fast. The Metropolitan and Metropolitan District Railways have not half enough feeders yet, and electric trams and omnibuses already promise to relieve us of the difficulty of providing horses and storing forage for them. The special habit of London, too, which is not so much to add street to street as city to city, diminishes the difficulty of distance, each city or quartier remaining for many of the purposes of life—for indispensable shopping, for instance, and the distribution of food—a self-contained entity, with everything absolutely essential to life procurable within its own circuit. The difficulty of room does not exist, and that of distance will, as it has done hitherto, gradually disappear, while that of food, enormous as it looks, is probably quite imaginary. Nothing can, it is true, be conceived that is primd facie more improbable, or even monstrous, than that twelve, or even eight millions of people should dwell together on land which, because of their houses, can grow nothing; but still, four millions of people already do it, and do not suffer. If they can be fed from outside, so can three times their number, the increase only requiring more railway. trucks, more carts, more steamers, and more hands, all of which are forthcoming in profusion. The idea that the means of intercommunication may be overtaxed has in it very little reason. London in 1830 contained a million-and-a-half of people, and as yet not a railway brought so much as a potato to the city. It is probable, indeed, that every increase of population makes London easier to feed by snaking it a more certain as well as profitable market, and thus increasing the permanent number and improving the organisation of those who live by supplying its necessities. The supplies of food must, no doubt, come from a distance; but then, so do the supplies of all England, and the storage of corn, meat, and vegetables near London is not more difficult than their storage anywhere else. Nothing in time of peace adjusts itself like the food-supply of a great city, and there is not, that we can remember, in modern history a clearly proved instance of a dangerous falling short. The preposterous " Law of the Maximum," in 1793, did, it is tree, nearly starve Paris for some months ; but the people still had bread, and the moment the law was abolished, the supplies became as ample as before. Nothing but war or insurrection could impede the working of the mechanism in London. As to water, the supply could be tripled with ease, either, as Mr. Harrison suggests, by stealing a lake from Westmoreland or Wales, or by constructing a lake of our own— a reservoir huge as a tank in Tanjore—in some spot where the rainfall is heavy, and rivulets easily collected. As to health, we doubt very greatly if a high death-rate will prevent crowding in London any more than in Naples ; but there will be no high death-rate. No spot can be more crowded than Marylebone, and Marylebone is healthier than most rural districts, and might be made, the hygeiste say, the healthiest spot to die in in the world, the death-rate being brought down to 12 or 13 per 1,000. Fogs would be blacker, no doubt, in a city so terribly extended ; but foga only kill the aged, and the energy of an epidemic does not depend upon the size of a city. London is not half so liable to cholera as, say, Plymouth ; and with every grand increase, say, of half.a.million, shows a greater tendency to immunity from ravaging disease.
It seems to us that only one of two causes could materially check the growth of London, and that neither of them is likely to occur. If the means of obtaining a livelihood became few, there must, of course, be decay ; but what sign is there of such a change P The volume of British trade does not diminish, but only the rate of profit ; and it is the volume, not the profit, which settles the number of bands required. There is no centri- fugal tendency perceptible removing commerce from the centre to the outporte, and the amount of manufacturing business does not diminish. On the contrary, all manufactures not -dependent on cheap coal tend towards London, where the supply of labour, and especially female labour, is always redundant, where strikes are difficult to organise, and where raw material of every kind is procurable at the shortest notice. So also does the depOt business arising from the fact that London is the banking-hone of the trade of the world, and the place where everything may be most safely stored and most readily sold for cash. These causes, which have filled East London, must continue to work while quiet is maintained ; and there is no proof as yet that quiet will be seriously disturbed. The vastness of London, which alarms so many speculators on social problems, has as yet tended only to increase order, first by enlarging the indus- trial army, which can never desire disturbance; and secondly, by impressing the imagination of ruling men, who even now rather exaggerate than minimise the effect of a successful London riot. The difficulty of the unemployed is, no doubt, a serious one ; but we think it will be found, in the long-ran, that the concentration of labour will increase rather than diminish the facilities of affording relief, while it is certain that London develops charity as no other place in the world does. We are afraid to quote the figures, lest we should be deluged with letters, but we have had before us evidence that London gives away, population for population, more than double what is given by any English city, and fourfold what is given by any city of the Continent. Finally, what is to diminish the great cause of the growth of London,—its attractiveness as a social centre P The present writer is one of those who, though condemned to live in London, do not feel its attrac- tiveness, wearying always of the mental pressure caused by the mere existence of such multitudes ; but the infinite majority do feel it. Every month, the most energetic, the most active, the most hopeful men in the villages and the little towns emigrate to London, where life is lively, and the streets are full, and the individual is unwatched yet secure, and there is an off-chance, however remote, for every man ; and they never leave it again. One would not think the smaller streets, which in London are so unintelligibly squalid, were very attractive; but it is certain that, to a majority of their residents, life anywhere else seems almost unbearably insipid, and that a village favourite once submerged in that whirlpool, is lost to that village for evermore. The immigrants may not prosper as a body, but they must prosper in great numbers. The present writer, living a year or two ago in an out-of-the-way village in South Eng- land, with less than twelve hundred people in it, was startled to find that a Bank Holiday brought to it forty visitors, all 83128 of artisans, petty shopkeepers, and labourers, all well clothed, all in their own judgment "getting on," and all able to throw away a railway-fare for three hundred miles, not only for them- selves, but for their wives and sweethearts, just to see their kinsfolks' faces once a year. Every one of those men felt raised in the scale of being by having become a Londoner, and they are but samples of those who, on the same day, were pouring into the twenty thousand parishes and hamlets of the country. This disposition to appreciate London has grown all through the writer's lifetime, and is growing still, until it has become, with many of the few who return, a positive disease, a nostalgia, as it were, reversed. It is as keen as the senti- ment of Parisians, which is a passion, and it increases with every development of education, not unnaturally, for the first result of education is to make one percipient of dullness. The consciousness of the rural classes has awakened to the monotony as well as to the comparative hopelessness of their lives, and the passion for " town " is slowly emptying many a country- side, rendering them, we may add, far pleasanter places to those for whom seclusion and silence have their charms. The dreamers think that a peasant tenure will cure that disposition ; but though we are on their side for other reasons, we doubt their judgment upon this, and believe that with increasing cultivation the indraft of London, clue to its attractiveness, will be found stronger and stronger, till in 1980 our great.grandohildren will smile to think that when London was comparatively a village, with only four millions of people in it, it was thought an over- grown place.
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