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 bottom, with no building stone at hand, and therefore she was
forecondemned by her very position to the curse of brick and stucco,
when Bath, Oxford, Edinburgh, were all built out of their own quarries.
Then fire destroyed all her mediæval architecture, leaving her only
Westminster Abbey to suggest the greatness of her losses. But
brick-earth and fire have been as nothing in their way by the side of
the evil wrought by Gog and Magog. When five hundred trembling ghosts of
naked Lord Mayors have to answer for their follies and their sins
hereafter, I confidently expect the first question in the appalling
indictment will be, "Why did you allow the richest nation on earth to
house its metropolis in a squalid village?"

We have a Moloch in England to whom we sacrifice much. And his hateful
name is Vested Interest.




XIII.