doubt we shall be carried up and down the river in electric launches -not in smoky, noisome, puffing, and snorting steamboats. Steam engines of all kinds will be excluded from the city-power being obtained from electric and other non-infecting sources. I need hardly say that in the good time to come no smoke will pollute the air and ruin the vegetation of London. That some millions of house chimneys and ten thousand factory chimneys should be suffered to pour out into the pure air of heaven their poisonous fumes, so that we are all to be choked with soot, our flowers and shrubs stunted, our public buildings, statues, and carvings begrimed with a sulphurous deposit— this to our descendants will seem an abomination and a public crime, to be sternly suppressed by law and opinion. They will hardly believe what they read in history that such things were in the nineteenth century. It will seem to them as strange as it does to us when we read that our savage ancestors ate their dinners with their fingers, wore sheepskin clothes for a lifetime, and went to bed between foul rugs, without any clothes at all.

No doubt the reformers of those days were asked with sneers how the people were to procure so many forks and nightgowns, just as we are asked to-day how we are going to abolish smoking chimneys.. Our answer is that it can be done-it can be done by science, labour, economy, and public opinion. And therefore it must be done, and the sooner the better. When we stand on the Capitol or the Pincian Hill at Rome, or look down over Florence from the Boboli Terrace ;. when we survey Paris from Notre Dame, or Genoa from the Church of Carignano; when we see how glorious and happy is the look of a smokeless city in a bright sky, how refreshing are the terraces, housetops, and balconies bright with flowers and laid out with summer arbours and garden retreats-it makes one boil with indignation to think that in our own cities at home neither house gardens nor arbours are possible, from the gross indifference with which we suffer preventible nuisances to choke us.

In the good time coming rivers of pure mountain water will be carried into London by gigantic aqueducts, as at ancient Rome. Wer shall no longer run the risk of poison from polluted drains, or of a water famine from the shrinking of a petty river. Our water supply will come from inexhaustible lakes and reservoirs. Ancient Rome, with its fourteen aqueducts, is the true type; it has never yet been surpassed, or even equalled. Already some northern cities are fairly supplied in a similar way. It would have been done for London long ago, but for commercial self-interest, political intrigué, and administrative jealousy and confusion. It is a blot on our modern civilisation that the water supply of London is still so scanty, so impure, so uncertain, and so dear.

In the good time coming we shall not buy water of money-making

speculators any more than we now buy fresh air, or a ticket for Hyde Park, or a pass across London Bridge. Water, like air, highways, and parks, is a prime necessity of civilised life, and it is the business of the State to supply it to citizens freely, in absolute purity and unlimited abundance. I can remember a time when several bridges over the Thames exacted tolls, and when London was surrounded with turnpikes. It sounds incredible to us that our fathers could endure such a drag on civilisation. And it will sound incredible to our descendants that we suffered water to be bought and sold and haggled for in the market. We must go back to the standard of Rome with free and unlimited water, with baths and public washhouses in every main thoroughfare.

Pure water, unlimited in quantity, accessible to all, fresh air, spacious highways, ample recreation grounds-these things are a necessity of health, and the health of the citizens is a primary public .concern. It has been the pride of the last half-century that vast sanitary reform has been accomplished. And the proof of it is found in the diminishing death-rate of most great cities, and in the highest degree of London. There are cities in Europe to-day where the death-rate is double that of London-nay, where it is three times what the death-rate of London has been for whole months within the last year. The normal death-rate of Cairo is nearly three times that of London; 80,000 lives per annum at least are saved in London which would be sacrificed but for the advance of sanitary science and municipal reform. But we are only at the beginning of our task. The rate in London may now be said to be brought well below 20 per 1000. 1000. In the good time to come it will be brought down to ten. At this moment there are squares and terraces in the West where the rate is not so high as this. The death-rate of Derby this very week is under ten. And to this ideal limit it must be brought before sanitary reform has said its last word.

That word will not be said until every sewer is as free from poisonous gas and deadly ferments as a scullery sink in a well-found house; until the suspicion of preventible infection and contagion is entirely removed, until the infants of the poor are no more destroyed by unintentional infanticide than are the infants of the rich; until birth, measles, whooping-cough, and scarlatina have ceased to decimate the homes of the careless, the ignorant, and the indigent. As it is, at least a quarter of our present death-rate is due to conditions which if those responsible were not so helpless and so ignorant would amount to manslaughter and even murder. And perhaps a fifth of the death-rate over and above this is due to conditions which are distinctly preventible by science and by organisation. In the good time to come the 50,000 or 60,000 lives we slaughter annually in London alone by our stupidity and mismanagement will be told by our

descendants as an abnormal barbarism such as caused the Plague and the Black Death of old.

I am speaking, I trust you will believe, by no means at random and by a vague guess, but from long and careful comparison of various statistics. I will give you one striking example. Rome, having become the capital of Italy, set about a vigorous reform of its sanitary condition. Now, the climate of Rome is one of the most dangerous and uncertain in Europe, and the physical conditions of Rome, except for its grand water supply, offer many peculiar difficulties. Yet in twenty years Rome has reduced its death-rate by one-third, in spite of doubling its population. In 100 years the death-rate of London has been reduced by one-half, in spite of its enormous increase. Within the last ten years the deaths of many great cities of North Europe, even under the very difficult conditions of such countries as Holland and Belgium, have been reduced by 10 and 20 per cent. It is a question entirely of science, organisation, education. There are spots even now where a death-rate of 8 per thousand has been known. London, when it has a clean Thames and abundant and pure water, will be naturally one of the healthiest places in Europe. Why should its death-rate be 18 instead of 8? For no reason but for bad govern ment, ignorance, and indifference, public as well as private.

The problem of health will take a foremost place in the municipal organisation of the future; and a large part of the problem concerns the treatment of disease and death. The hospitals of Ideal London will not be imposing palaces, filling the best sites and endangering the health of the city. All that is a medieval tradition, maintained for the convenience of the doctors in large practice, and for the advertising aim of being always in public view. Small accident and emergency wards will be multiplied at convenient spots. But the great standing hospitals will be removed to airy suburbs, reached by special rail and tram lines with ambulance cars of wonderful ingenuity, the hospitals themselves, being constantly disinfected, pulled to pieces, and rebuilt, so as at last to get rid of hospital pyæmia and the melancholy death-rate of our actual clumsy pest-houses.

The disposal of the dead is an even more urgent problem. I am old enough to remember the dark ages when the population of London was interred in graveyards within the city itself. One of my memories as a child was that of occasional residence in a house which actually abutted on such a burial-ground, and my leisure hours were much absorbed in watching the funerals hour by hour. I am one of those who survived this atrocious custom, which still endangers the health of our city, and for generations to come will continue to be a source of infection. Some fifty years ago the intra-mural graveyards were closed and the suburban cemeteries were formed. But, alas! they are suburban no longer. The ever-advancing city has begun to

encircle them, and they are again becoming a new source of infection and nuisance. They are driving us to more and more outlying cemeteries, which can only be reached by a long railway journey, and are to all of us difficult to visit.

The result is this. A city which requires its 80,000 interments year by year is compelled to bury its dead either in cemeteries, overcrowded and practically within the city of the living, or else in cemeteries so far from its city that each funeral involves a fatiguing and costly journey, and visits to the tomb of the departed loved ones become rare or impracticable. If the population of London continues to increase it will soon need year by year 100,000 burials-equal to the whole population of famous cities in old times. Where can these be disposed of with safety, so as not to be put away from us for ever, and that only after a wearisome and expensive travel? In this dilemma I do not doubt that London will largely return to the ancient and honoured practice of cremation. Cremation affords to the living absolute protection from infection and poison; to the survivors it spares them the horrible associations of the decaying remains; it solves the problem which awaits us the appalling accumulation of some millions of corpses in one city in each decade; and it enables the family to place the inurned ashes of those they cherish in a church, or in a cloister, or in a city graveyard, or in any spot, above ground or under ground, public or private, close at hand, and yet entirely void of offence, where the sacred remains may be visited from time to time with perfect ease and peace. It is too much forgotten that cremation is a scientific process for preparing the remains of the dead for such permanent disposal as we please to select, and whether by interment or not. The calcined residuum of the body is no longer a horror and pollution to the living, but may be preserved for ages either in a visible urn in some consecrated spot, or buried in a grave or vault precisely like a coffin. All the sacred associations of the tomb, all the genius loci of the grave are retained when the purified ashes are shrined in their urn and set up in monument or niche. in my visions I see the London that is to be filled with mausoleums and chapels and cloisters, wherein the dust of generations will lie in perfect peace yet in the midst of the living, far from all possible danger or offence, yet always before their sight and present to their memory, be it in some consecrated urn, or beneath the sod in the midst, or underneath the pavement that is trodden by generations to

come.

So

The problem of reorganising London has taken a new phase since the division into sixty parliamentary boroughs. London is being gradually broken up into manageable parts, each of which is a large and rich municipality with its own administration and local institutions and buildings. Some of these, such as Battersea, Chelsea,

Poplar, and Westminster, are beginning to show real municipal life. The movement is still in formation. But it opens a vision of the future when, with an adequate central government and a real unity of London as a whole, its component parts may have their own local institutions, life, and character; their own halls, libraries, schools, museums, playgrounds, parks, and public centres, so that the life of a great city may be offered to all citizens within a mile of their own homes and within reach of their own influence.

The London that is to be, if, indeed, it is to remain with a population counted by millions, will be an aggregate of many cities, each equal in area to Nottingham or Edinburgh, and each possessing a complete city organisation of its own, but all uniting in one central civic constitution. The great arteries of communication will be broad and stately boulevards, without the artificial monotony of new avenues in Paris, and without the makeshift meanness of Shaftesbury Avenue and the Charing Cross Road. The traveller who lingers with delight round the Hotel de Ville and the Fountain of the Innocents in Paris; in the Via Balbi and round San Lorenzo at Genoa; in the old Piazzas of Florence and Venice; who strolls along the Corso at Rome, feels his heart sink within him as he returns to the biggest and richest city of the world, and marks how grimy, how paltry, and inconvenient are the streets, and open spaces, and public buildings of London. Neither breadth, nor dignity, nor permanence, nor self-respect (to say nothing of art and beauty) seem ever to have suggested themselves to the tasteless tradesmen who (we suppose) ordered from ignorant carpenters the cheapest and commonest sort of road or hall which contractors could erect. But it is not to last for ever. Ideal London will far surpass actual Paris in natural conditions, and I think in free play of thought and aim. The race which built the Abbey, and Westminster Hall, St. Paul's, the Banqueting Hall, and laid out Piccadilly and the parks cannot be wholly incapable of a noble building. Even now, the energy and individuality of our character is asserting itself through the pall of convention and triviality which, since the Reformation and the civil wars, has afflicted us as a nation. London has magnificent opportunities, and carries within it the germs of noble art. The Ideal London of our dreams-nay, of our descendants-will be one of the noblest cities of Europe, a model of healthfulness, dignity, and convenience.

We want no Hausmanns and emperors here to drive uniform boulevards or rectangular squares through the old city, on the plan of a chessboard or a figure in geometry. The mechanical planning of a city, so dear to Transatlantic fancy and to the vanity of an autocrat in Europe, does not fall in with English habits and our secular traditions. I hope that the historic streets of London will ever be maintained, and the associations of the Strand, Ludgate Hill, Charing Cross,