Bishopsgate and Aldgate, Holborn and Piccadilly may live for centuries yet. I incline to think that it is as well that Wren's magnificent, but too geometric and revolutionary, scheme for rebuilding London after the Fire was never carried out. It was magnificent, but it was not practical. It was not practical, in that it would have swept away the history and traditions of London, just as the history and traditions of the old City of Paris in the Island have been swept away by the Imperial demolitions. No! let us keep the history and the traditions of London, even at the cost of some irregularity, narrowness, and inconveniences in the old streets, and retaining infinite variety in the form and style of the buildings along them. Tradition and variety in an ancient city outweigh all the regularity and symmetry of modern reconstruction.

If any one desires to see what has been done of late years, and what it was hoped to do in London improvements, let him study an important new work issued by the London County Council, and prepared by Mr. Percy Edwards, the able clerk of the Improvements Committee. They will see what Wren desired to make of London in 1666, what London was in 1855, what it is to-day, and all the changes made in it these forty-three years. It is a record of many improvements, not a few blunders, many fine schemes ruined by a cheeseparing economy, by political conflicts, by interested intrigues, by local jealousies, stupidity, bad taste, and lethargy. But, as we study that record of the edility of London for forty-three years, we need not despair of the London that is to be.

We shall not destroy the old historic lines and landmarks of London, which, as an organised city, has an unbroken record of a thousand years since Alfred rebuilt it after rescuing it from the Danes. We shall not sweep away the great lines and landmarks of mediæval London; but the hopelessly rotten and festering slums of the old crowded areas will have to be purified and rebuilt, and the inhabitants replaced in airy and commodious dwellings, at least half of them in fresh and healthy suburbs. But the old lines and lanes of mediaval London are hopelessly congested and need a vigorous treatment. We shall not abolish Fleet Street and the Strand, Cornhill, Gracechurch Street, Holborn, and Chancery Lane; but we shall add on new lines of communication that will relieve the arterial traffic. The heavy traffic of merchandise, stores, and plant passing across London, or along it from line to line, will be carried by deep electric railways underground, and also some light conveyance will be carried by new wrostatic modes of transit. It will be considered ridiculous to send machinery, coals, or heavy goods by the ordinary streets, which will be immensely relieved by the almost universal adoption of automobile cars in place of horse-carriages. I do not mean the horrid, stinking, rattling motor-cars we see to-day, but beautiful and elegant

vehicles, which will run quietly and silently by mechanical power. The main needs of London are easy and open avenues of communication from north to south, and across the Thames from Middlesex to Surrey. These in the good times to come will be doubled or trebled, partly by new bridges across our noble river and partly by sub-aqueous tunnels, fit for both rail, horse, and foot traffic. Especially there will be adequate avenues from the main northern, or Middlesex, railway termini to the main termini on the south, or Surrey side. Of these the proposed street from Holborn to the Strand (the most urgent of all the London problems) will form but a part. It is a most cheering and curious fact that this indispensable improvement can now be carried out, when treated on lines sufficiently bold and thorough, at a positive profit to the ratepayer, and without any ultimate expense to him at all. This also was done when Northumberland Avenue was made. And these examples prove that a wise and bold improvement in our city is a commercial success, and not a burden to the public purse. The great triumph of war, said the Conqueror, is to make war support itself. And the triumph of the city ædile, who wars on decay and obstruction, is so to make his improvements that, whilst they immensely promote the health and comfort of the citizen, they shall actually fill his budget instead of laying on him burdens.

In the good days to come, then, our Ideal London, our glorious city of Alfred and the Conqueror, of Chaucer and Milton, of Inigo Jones and Wren, of Johnson and Goldsmith, of Dickens and Thackeray, will be as bright and gay, as full of foliage and flowers, and fountains and statues as Paris or Florence, but without the monotony and the conventional boulevard driving which ruined Paris and have begun to ruin both Florence and Rome. Our vast city will then raise up its towers and steeples into a sky as bright and pure as that of Richmond Park. Coal smoke will be abolished as an intolerable nuisance, as unpardonable as a cess-pit or an open sewer. And I dream in my dreams that Science in the good days to come will invent a new tobacco, which whilst appeasing the appetite of the smoker will not be poisonous and offensive to those about him. In those days we should need no smoking cars in the trains, and could even sit on the garden seat of an omnibus without the risk of a very foul pipe. It would be ridiculous, if we abolish the nuisance of chimneys, that we should retain the still more noxious effluvia of tobacco. Women, who, I suppose, in those days will form the working majority of Parliament and the Ministry, will, no doubt, in good time see to all this.

Be this as it may, in the good time to come our city will be as pleasant to live in as are Oxford or Leamington or Bath to-day. The Tower of London, the most impressive and most venerable civic building in Europe, will be cleared and freed from intrusive and

dangerous lodgers, and will be occupied only by a military guard, Wren's glorious temple at St. Paul's will rise, white and majestic as the St. Peter's of Michael Angelo, and much more beautiful, thrusting its radiant colonnade and dome into a blue sky, where the golden cross will glitter in the pure air like the spires of Chichester and Salisbury to-day. The pile of shops and ignoble warehouses around it will have disappeared like a bad dream, and the great Cathedral will stand in a vast open space, approached on four sides by stately avenues. So with the British Museum and our few other fine buildings.

The silver Thames, without a trace of sewage or of mud, will flow brightly between its double line of embankments, covered with shady trees and adorned with statues and fountains. The vast concave curve of the Middlesex side of the river, from Chelsea to the Tower, will give scope to new and varied forms of architectural development. The old intra-mural graveyards will serve as sites for lovely cloisters wherein will rest in graceful urns the ashes of the city ancestors. And around the venerable Abbey-when its thousandth anniversary comes to pass in the twenty-third century-will be a new consecrated temple of peace, reconciliation, and honour, where a grateful people will enshrine the remains of the great dead ones whom it resolves to bury "to the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation."

FREDERIC HARRISON.

OUR FUTURE EMPIRE IN THE

FAR EAST.

THE

HE average Briton is somewhat slow of apprehension and insight in all questions of higher politics. He may, perhaps, interest himself in the passing questions of the moment, especially in those internal and purely British matters to which so much of the time of the House of Commons is devoted. But in regard to the larger issues, as the gathering up and summarising the net result of a whole series of passing political events with a view to a wise forecast of future developments, we are a little backward and dull. The race is pre-eminent in practical energy, and this has landed us, half blindly, as it were, and unawares, in possession of a vast empire. But our lack of abstract thought and intellectual perception leaves very many of us in ignorance of the laws which govern its development, the perils which threaten it, and the methods by which it must be held together in the future.

This is unlucky at the present moment, when the Empire as a whole is passing through, and will pass through in the era immediately in front of us, a crisis in its fortunes which beyond all reasonable question will be likely to make or break them.

I have thereupon argued in a previous paper in the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW, that we ought from time to time to pull ourselves together and review the general situation, and cry with Horace's forlorn maiden, "Unde quo veni."

A whole series of changes and rearrangements, especially in the Far East, have crowded upon us of late with almost bewildering rapidity. It seems eminently desirable that we should take stock of them, and see where we are going, with a view to grasp, if we can, their net outcome and probable issue.

I.

The cardinal fact of the whole situation in the Far East at present is that, if we are to carry out the programme which we have laid down, and not draw back with shame and confusion of face and with results disastrous to the fortunes of the Empire, we stand committed to a future empire in China comprising a very large fraction of China

proper.

Of course, this is no part of our programme, which is something very different. Our present idea, as very clearly expressed by Ministers and emphatically endorsed by the opposing leaders in the House, is to minimise our responsibilities. We are to avoid, as much as possible, any actual territorial acquisitions in China. We are to confine ourselves to keeping open the existing avenues of our trade, with, however, this all-important and well understood addition, that we are to make as many fresh avenues for it as we can see our way to make, and accordingly we have already made a goodly number. Nevertheless, the governing condition which must ultimately decide the whole case is this, that we can only keep other Powers out by deeds and not by words or by paper treaties. When great and ambitious Powers like Russia, Germany and France are fully determined to push their interests, from their own point of view, in the same quarter as ourselves, and are not prepared for a moment to accept our principle of universal freedom of trade and equality of opportunity all round in their own spheres, though naturally they graciously accept a free admission to ours, we can only keep them from strangling our trade and ruining our interests in China by occupying the ground ourselves.

This is practically admitted by our Government. For we have seen the same Minister who deplored the aggressions of other Powers on China, and loadly proclaimed our virtuous intentions of keeping our hands clean, if possible, driven within a month to announce to the House the coming acquisition of Wei-hai-Wei, and, which is far more important, an understanding with the Chinese amounting in practice to a British protectorate of the great Yang-tse valley, comprising about three-sevenths of China proper, and nearly half of her total population, or about 185,000,000 of Chinese.

This understanding or veiled protectorate will probably be reduced to a formal treaty, which will have its ironical and humorous side. The Chinese will promise us, in set terms, that they will not alienate, or dispose of, the huge territories comprised within the valley of the Yang-tse without our consent. It is as if a man were to promise a friend in a legal document that he will not cut out his own heart and liver, and dispose of them to others, without that friend's permission!