, on straight level stretches miles from any collection of
dwellings, will not keep down speed so long as dangerous cobblestoned
alleys, winding through suburban London towns, have no guardian to
regulate the traffic or give the stranger a hint that he had best go
slowly.

The milk and butchers' carts go on with their deadly work, but the
police in England are too busy worrying the motorist to pay any
attention.

Some county boroughs have applied a ten-mile speed limit, even though
the great bulk of their area is open country; but twenty miles an
hour for an automobile is far safer for the public than is most other
traffic, regardless of the rate at which it moves.

[Illustration: "Speed" painting, Louis de Schryver]

Speed, so far as the bystander is concerned, is a very difficult
thing to judge, and the automobilist seldom, if ever, gets fair
treatment if he meets with the slightest accident.

Most people judge the speed of an automobile by the noise that it
makes. This, up to within a few years, put most automobiles going at
a slow speed at a great disadvantage, for the slower they went the
noisier they were; but matters of design and control have changed
this somewhat, and the public now protests because "a great
death-dealing monster crept up silently behind--coming at a terrific
rate." You cannot please every one, and you cannot educate a
non-participating public all at once.

As for speed on the road, it is a variable thing, and a thing
difficult to estimate correctly. Electric cars run at a speed of from
ten to twenty-two miles an hour in England, even in the towns, and no
one says them nay. Hansoms, on the Thames Embankment in London, do
their regular fifteen miles an hour, but automobiles are still held
down to ten.

The official timekeeper of the Automobile Club of Great Britain and
Ireland took the following times (in 1905) in Piccadilly, one of the
busiest, if not the most congested thoroughfare in London.

Holloway horse-drawn bus 11.3 miles per hour
Cyclist 15.85 " " "
Private trap 13.08 " " "
Private buggy 13.55 " " "
Private brougham 14.80 " " "

When one considers how difficult to control, particularly amid
crowded traffic, a horse-drawn vehicle is, and how very easy it is to
control an up-to-date automobile, one cannot but feel that a little
more consideration should be shown the automobilist by those in
authori