s and the men, and the
scattered red-tiled roofs and the big hayricks, it does not make a bad
holiday to get a quiet pony and ride about there on a sunny afternoon of
autumn, and look over the river and the craft passing up and down, and on
to Shooters' Hill and the Kentish uplands, and then turn round to the
wide green sea of the Essex marsh-land, with the great domed line of the
sky, and the sun shining down in one flood of peaceful light over the
long distance. There is a place called Canning's Town, and further out,
Silvertown, where the pleasant meadows are at their pleasantest:
doubtless they were once slums, and wretched enough."

The names grated on my ear, but I could not explain why to him. So I
said: "And south of the river, what is it like?"

He said: "You would find it much the same as the land about Hammersmith.
North, again, the land runs up high, and there is an agreeable and well-
built town called Hampstead, which fitly ends London on that side. It
looks down on the north-western end of the forest you passed through."

I smiled. "So much for what was once London," said I. "Now tell me
about the other towns of the country."

He said: "As to the big murky places which were once, as we know, the
centres of manufacture, they have, like the brick and mortar desert of
London, disappeared; only, since they were centres of nothing but
'manufacture,' and served no purpose but that of the gambling market,
they have left less signs of their existence than London. Of course, the
great change in the use of mechanical force made this an easy matter, and
some approach to their break-up as centres would probably have taken
place, even if we had not changed our habits so much: but they being such
as they were, no sacrifice would have seemed too great a price to pay for
getting rid of the 'manufacturing districts,' as they used to be called.
For the rest, whatever coal or mineral we need is brought to grass and
sent whither it is needed with as little as possible of dirt, confusion,
and the distressing of quiet people's lives. One is tempted to believe
from what one has read of the condition of those districts in the
nineteenth century, that those who had them under their power worried,
befouled, and degraded men out of malice prepense: but it was not so;
like the mis-education of which we were talking just now, it came of
their dreadful poverty. They were obliged to put up with everything, and
even pretend t