ith the
Ring at Cologne (to keep close home all the time), where one can see
whole rows of German Renaissance houses of extraordinary interest. What
street in London can be mentioned in this respect side by side with
Commonwealth Avenue or Beacon Street in Boston; with Euclid Avenue in
Cleveland, Ohio; with the upper end of Fifth Avenue, New York; nay, even
with the new Via Roma at Genoa? Why is it that we English can't get on
the King's Road at Brighton anything faintly approaching that splendid
sea front on the Digue at Ostend, or those coquettish white villas that
line the Promenade des Anglais at Nice? The blight of London seems to
lie over all Southern England.

Paris looks like the capital of a world-wide empire. London, looks like
a shapeless neglected suburb, allowed to grow up by accident anyhow. And
that's just the plain truth of it. 'Tis a fortuitous concourse of
hap-hazard houses.

"But we are improving somewhat. The County Council is opening out a few
new thoroughfares piecemeal." Oh yes, in an illogical, unsystematic,
English patchwork fashion, we are driving a badly-designed, unimpressive
new street or two, with no expansive sense of imperial greatness,
through the hopelessly congested and most squalid quarters. But that is
all. No grand, systematic, reconstructive plan, no rising to the height
of the occasion and the Empire! You tinker away at a Shaftesbury Avenue.
Parochial, all of it. And there you get the real secret of our futile
attempts at making a town out of our squalid village. The fault lies all
at the door of the old Corporation, and of the people who made and still
make the old Corporation possible. For centuries, indeed, there was
really no London, not even a village; there was only a scratch
collection of contiguous villages. The consequence was that here, at the
centre of national life, the English people grew wholly unaccustomed to
the bare idea of a town, and managed everything piecemeal, on the petty
scale of a country vestry. The vestryman intelligence has now overrun
the land; and if the London County Council ever succeeds at last in
making the congeries of villages into--I do not say a city, for that is
almost past praying for, but something analogous to a second-rate
Continental town, it will only be after long lapse of time and violent
struggles with the vestryman level of intellect and feeling.

London had many great disadvantages to start with. She lay in a dull and
marshy bot