XV111 INTRODUCTION. 



which the active brain and heart of the country are con- 

 tinually being concentrated. That London is no longer 

 a city, but a nation gathered together in one spot, is a 

 truism : our other great cities are almost keeping pace 

 with it in growth; but in none of them can we see a 

 trace of any attempt to open up their closely peopled 

 quarters in a way that is calculated to produce a really 

 beneficial effect on the lives and health of their workers. 

 Parks we have, it is true ; yet they but partially supply the 

 necessities of large cities. They would serve all our wants 

 if the population breathed only as often as they put on 

 holiday attire or have time to walk, it may be several miles, 

 to a park; but, as we are constituted, room for locomotion, 

 room for the ever-cleansing breeze to search out impurities, 

 room for a few trees to steal away the dark and unlovely 

 aspect of our streets — in a word, room for breathing — is a 

 more pressing necessity than parks. The French have their 

 parks and public gardens, and very extensive and well- 

 managed ones, though, like some of our own, embellished 

 in a wasteful and unnecessary manner with costly and tender 

 plants; but their noble tree-planted roads, small public 

 squares and places, are doing more for them than parks 

 and pelargoniums — saving them from pestilential over- 

 crowding, and making their city something besides a place 

 for all to live out of who can afford it. 



A great many of us Britons are apt to connect real city 

 improvement with autocratic government. One has onlv 

 to speak of our backwardness, when he is instantly re- 

 minded that it is all in consequence of not being blessed 

 with a Napoleon, and that there is for us no chance of 

 amelioration except we can secure a ruler who, after puri- 

 fying and putting our cities into decent nineteenth century 

 order, will good-humouredly take a month's notice to 

 quit. If the logic of such reasoners were at all in pro- 

 portion to their abundance, we should move onward but 

 little more progressively than the man-like apes. There is 

 no natural human want or wrong that cannot be remedied 

 by human wisdom and energy ; and the most crying evil of 

 this period of change, when the mass of workers are steadily 



