from a tap in
each tenement. Why should London's million families waste their
million fires every time hot water is needed?

"The economy of fuel leads, indeed, to the municipalised gas-supply,
then laid on, as a matter of course, to every tenement, and used, not
only for lighting, but still more largely for cooking in the stoves
supplied at a nominal charge.

"In order to relieve the pressure of population in the centre, and
reduce the rents of the metropolitan "Connaughts," the County Council
tramways will doubtless be made as free as its roads and bridges.
Taxes on locomotion are universally condemned, and the economic
effects of a penny tram-fare are precisely the same as those of a tax
on the trip. The County Council will, however, free its trams on the
empirical grounds of economy and the development of its suburban
estates of artisans' dwellings, built on land bought to retain the
unearned increment for the public benefit. Free trams may well imply
free trains in the metropolitan and suburban area. Does not the
Council already run a free service of steamboats on the Thames at
North Woolwich--eventually, no doubt, to be extended all along the
stream?

"Public libraries and reading-rooms in every ward are nearly here
already, but we may expect that the library and the public hall will
go far to cut out the tavern (at present our only 'public' house) as
the poor man's club. As for bands of music in the parks, municipal
fetes, and fireworks on 'Labour Day,' and other instances of the
communalisation of the means of 'enjoyment,' all this is already
common form in France. The parks, indeed, will be tremendous affairs.
But when London's gas and water and markets are owned and controlled
by its public authorities; when its tramways, and perhaps its local
railways, are managed like its roads and parks, not for private
profit, but for public use; when the metropolis at length possesses
its own river, and its own docks; when its site is secure from
individual tyranny, and its artisans' dwellings from the whims of
philanthropy; when, in short, London collectively really takes its own
life into its own hands, a vast army of London's citizens will be
directly enrolled in London's service."[688]

The foregoing political and economic programme would be more
creditable to an imaginative schoolgirl ten years old than to a man of
science and a politician. How are all these wonderful and almost
miraculous changes to be financ