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■with smoking embers when the most distinguished architect of the 

 age seized the opportunity to urge a project for laying out the street 

 system of a new town upon the same site. The most novel feature 

 of this plan was the introduction of certain main channel streets, 

 ninety feet wide, in which several wagons could be driven abreast 

 upon straight courses from one end of the city to the other. It was 

 also proposed- that there should be a series of parallel and intersect- 

 ing streets sixty feet wide, with intermediate lanes of thirty feet. 

 • The enormous advantages of such a system of streets over any 

 others then in use in the large towns of Europe were readily demon- 

 strated ; it obtained the approval of the king himself, and would 

 have been adopted but for the incredible short-sightedness of the 

 merchants and real estate owners. These obstinately refused to 

 give themselves any concern about the sacrifice of general incon- 

 venience or the future advantages to their city, which it was shown 

 that a disregard of Wren's suggestions would involve, but proceeded 

 at once, as fast as possible, without any concert of action, to build 

 anew, each man for himself, upon the ruins of his old warehouse. 

 There can be little question that, had the property owner's at this 

 time been wise enough to act as a body in reference to their com- 

 mon interests, and to have allowed Wren to devise and carry out a 

 complete street system, intelligently adapted to the requirements 

 which he would have been certain to anticipate ; as well as those 

 which were already pressing, it would have relieved the city of 

 London of an incalculable expenditure which has since been required 

 to mend its street arrangements ; would have greatly lessened the 

 weight of taxation, which soon afterwards rose to be higher than in 

 any other town of the kingdom, and would have saved millions of 

 people from the misery of poverty and disease. 



Although in a very few years after the rebuilding of the city, its 

 commerce advanced so much as to greatly aggravate the incon- 

 veniences under which street communication had been previously 

 carried on, the difficulties were allowed to grow greater and greater 

 for fully a century more, before anything was done calculated to 

 essentially alleviate them, They seem to have been fully realized, 

 and to have been constantly deplored, nor were efforts of a certain 

 kind wanting to remedy them ; the direction of these efforts, how- 

 ever, shows how strongly a traditional standard of street convenience 

 yet confused the judgment even of the most advanced. A town being 

 still thought of as a collection of buildings all placed as closely as 

 possible to one centre, was also regarded as a place of necessarily 

 inconvenient confinement, and, therefore, of crowding, hustling, and 



