The Great London.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume I, Issue 21, 13 November 1879, Page 4

The Great London.

(From Ike. Spectator),

London, said Lord Carnarvon, had, in many great patriotic struggles always' been on the winning side—so that if, as Mar* shal Blucher had said, it was the finest city in the world to plunder, it had never had to undergo that uncomfortable process but had become instead not only the great shop but the great counting-house of the world. In the eighteenth century Hume, the 'philosopher, bar v lectured that no great city woo’d v. a population of more than 700,0b'! -peculation, which he tried to demons’,’:.ro f ,, mn citing the casrs of London and Paris. In fact, London has now a population of 4,000,000, “a population approaching that of Scotland,” [sorely Lord Carnarvon should have sc id exceed; ng it,] “and 1 venture to say, with a : ! raspc. t for Scotland, almost ■is into’’’you 1.’ Prance is alraid to scat her parliament in Pan-*. 'Cue United States are averse to seat theirs at Washington. England feels no anxiety about seating hers in London. In spite of a great professionally criminal class, a

handful of police effectually keeps order while the mighty self-acting mechanism by which the 4,000,000 of Londoners are fed, and fed s rely, and without oven the chance of mishap, is one of the wonders of the world, and one of those which is least wondered at. In Borne, you catch Roman fever. In Constantinople, you wake up and find that a third of the city has been burned down while you slept. In a single twelvemonth and but a few years ago, Paris suffered two sieges, fa mine, and civil war. In the great cities of America you hear of vast conspiracies of corruption, which make your hair stand on end but London, so much bigger than any of them, goes on her own way, not, of course, without great blunders, but still, with a certain uniformity of peace and progress.” Lend Carnarvon is right London is a great-marvel among cities. And her strength consists not in intensity of social feeling, like Paris, nor in splendour of historic memories, like Home—but rather in the sagacity which comes of sober, practical energies, and of a sedate and solid, but sometimes both slow and frigid judgment.