The annual increase of London

There are tens of thousands who prefer to loaf or starve in the streets rather than to work in comfort in the fields. Nearly one-third of the annual increase of London is due to immigration; and the immigrants are in great measure both destitute and incapable. Is it that our agricultural system is sorely at fault; that labour in the country is become so flat, stale, and unprofitable, with opportunities so wretched, hopes so few, and life so weary and sordid, that the countryman at all risks will crave the crowd, the glare, the excitement of the city, even though it offers an almost certain wretchedness and squalor? If this be so, if our civilisation has come to this, that the labourer finds the country intolerable, a complete resettlement of rural life is at hand.

Democratic governments

But we cannot attribute too much to this; for this vast and rapid increase of great cities is a feature of modern civilization. It is equally marked under despotic or democratic governments, in monarchies and republics, with a peasant proprietary or a system of great domains, on both sides of the Atlantic, in every race, in both hemispheres, in Asia, Africa, and America, as well as in Europe. Paris, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Brussels, New York, Lyons, Marseilles, Milan, Munich sightseeing turkey, Moscow, Turin, Bombay, and New Orleans have increased in fifty years more than London; and Glasgow, Hamburg, Philadelphia, and Chicago increase at a far higher ratio. So the increase of London, tremendous as it is, has nothing exceptional about it but its enormous positive volume. The increase itself, and even the rate of increase, is at bottom the result of modern industrial life and modern mechanical resources.

Of this vast problem, or wilderness of problems, it is enough to touch on one or two; and those rather of the simpler and material sort. Take the single one of water supply, a necessity of life, and the condition of health of inconvenient in supply, very various in quality, and exposed to one or two immense risks of pollution. We are at times drinking water that is minutely but sensibly infected with deposit. Though the recuperative energy of moving water usually restores it to a fairly wholesome condition, we all know that London is not quite safe from a catastrophe. A single epidemic might any summer make the water of London as deadly as the climate of Vera Cruz. Now, the death-rate of Vera Cruz in London would mean an extra mortality of nearly 200,000.