especially of such old-established towns as London,
whose central portions have the narrowest arteries, present a quite
unprecedented state of congestion. When the Green of some future
_History of the English People_ comes to review our times, he will, from
his standpoint of comfort and convenience, find the present streets of
London quite or even more incredibly unpleasant than are the filthy
kennels, the mudholes and darkness of the streets of the seventeenth
century to our enlightened minds. He will echo our question, "Why _did_
people stand it?" He will be struck first of all by the omnipresence of
mud, filthy mud, churned up by hoofs and wheels under the inclement
skies, and perpetually defiled and added to by innumerable horses.
Imagine his description of a young lady crossing the road at the Marble
Arch in London, on a wet November afternoon, "breathless, foul-footed,
splashed by a passing hansom from head to foot, happy that she has
reached the further pavement alive at the mere cost of her ruined
clothes."... "Just where the bicycle might have served its most useful
purpose," he will write, "in affording a healthy daily ride to the
innumerable clerks and such-like sedentary toilers of the central
region, it was rendered impossible by the danger of side-slip in this
vast ferocious traffic." And, indeed, to my mind at least, this last is
the crowning absurdity of the present state of affairs, that the clerk
and the shop hand, classes of people positively starved of exercise,
should be obliged to spend yearly the price of a bicycle upon a
season-ticket, because of the quite unendurable inconvenience and danger
of urban cycling.

Now, in what direction will matters move? The first and most obvious
thing to do, the thing that in many cases is being attempted and in a
futile, insufficient way getting itself done, the thing that I do not
for one moment regard as the final remedy, is the remedy of the
architect and builder--profitable enough to them, anyhow--to widen the
streets and to cut "new arteries." Now, every new artery means a series
of new whirlpools of traffic, such as the pensive Londoner may study for
himself at the intersection of Shaftesbury Avenue with Oxford Street,
and unless colossal--or inconveniently steep--crossing-bridges are made,
the wider the affluent arteries the more terrible the battle of the
traffic. Imagine Regent's Circus on the scale of the Place de la
Concorde. And there is the value o