84 DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH IN ENGLAND 



these was in 1665, and though the great fire of the year 

 following purified the city in some measure, yet the disease was 

 not finally rooted out for a generation afterwards. And as 

 the plague was an occasional visitor, so typhus, or spotted 

 fever as our ancestors called it, was the cause of the largest 

 number of deaths in ordinary years. 



The filthiness of London was incredible. The approach 

 to the City from the West was over a river of filth, the Fleet. 

 There were two minor abominations in the Strand, crossed by 

 bridges. There was no real drainage, and every square foot 

 of London was polluted by the dead and the living. Even 

 the water-supply obtained by the City from Paddington, and 

 later on by the energy of Middleton from Amwell, was 

 tainted by the medium through which it had to pass. The city, 

 which when it had only a tenth or twentieth of its numbers 

 contained numerous open spaces, was beginning to be densely 

 peopled, and the gardens of the citizens and the Companies 

 to be occupied by buildings, the streets being narrow and 

 hardly ventilated. Open markets were held in spaces still 

 known, and in many others which have long ago been cleared 

 of such business, or such nuisances. The site of the Mansion 

 House, and of the space between the Royal Exchange and 

 what was afterwards to be the Bank, was one of these markets, 

 chiefly for the commonest kind of provisions and coarse vege- 

 tables. The streets, unpaved and uncleansed, were at the best 

 of times ankle-deep in pestiferous mud, or pestiferous dust. 

 And within a short distance of all London wealth were the 

 principal haunts of all London criminals, the numerous 

 * Liberties ' of the City and its suburbs. Even in Paris, 

 already the centre of fashion, the^city from which would-be 

 despots drew their maxims of government, from which place- 

 hunters derived the precedents and practices by which the 

 public was plundered, and beaux imported wigs and brandy, 

 the streets were commonly impassable. A century after the 

 English Revolution, Arthur Young, in his Tour in France, 

 tells us that there were no pavements in the streets, and that 



