RAILWAYS AND CITY POPULATION.

IN the infancy of Railroads many towns viewed them as of old pest-houses were viewed, and drove them afar off as intolerable nuisances. After awhile, however, these sapient municipalities found themselves stranded high and dry, whilst they had the mortification of seeing the main stream of life and commerce passing through hitherto unimportant hamlets, and suddenly swelling them into towns of consequence. One would have thought that a lesson still fresh in the minds of most middle-aged persons of the community would not have been without its influence, and that in these days citizens and the Legislature would be as ready to receive the rails into their midst as they were of old to banish them afar off. But if we are to believe the statements of a few noble lords of the Upper House, metropolitan lines are still greater nuisances than were the lines of old traversing the country.

Lord Shaftesbury thought the Great Eastern Railway Company ought not to possess themselves of Finsbury Circus. Open spaces are so many lobes of the metropolitan lung, without which the "tailors and shoemakers cannot breathe. So far so good; and speaking generally we agree that we should rather multiply than diminish such wells of fresh air; but it does seem rather extraordinary that in the very next breath his lordship is found complaining that upwards of a thousand houses will be cleared by this same company for the continuation of its main line and branches into the metropolis. Now, to make a line is to make a very wide street, and to open up avenues of fresh air. In the one case the company are flagellated for building in an open space, and then, again, they are threatened with the lash for

wishing to open new ones. It is quite clear that, hit high or hit low, his lordship is not to be satisfied.

Then, again, we have a dismal picture painted by his lordship of the fever jungles in which tailors and shoemakers are obliged to live; and yet, when it is proposed to ventilate these fever districts with open lines, the hardship of turning them "out at a week's notice" is insisted upon. In our opinion, the only way to get rid of the pestilential nest of dens in which the working population of this metropolis at present live, is to separate them by moving among them railway lines in every direction, and in this manner disintegrating and breaking them up just as the police do dangerous multitudes, by moving among them wedge-like divisions of their force.

The Great Fire of London, which swept away the old town, was a mercy attended, no doubt, with much suffering; but we believe that the introduction of the scores of lines which are intended to form links of intercommunication between the great stations in the suburbs, will end in a second destruction of London-a London, we may say, that, with all our boasting, is not in its back slums very much in advance of that of two centuries ago.

A very important feature of most of the metropolitan lines of rail is, that they strike at the very heart of the metropolis instead of keeping in the far distant background. No doubt this very boldness will raise up opposition against them; but, as far as we can see, wholly without cause.

The dealings of the great masses of the population are with the old channels of communication; we want to get into the great thoroughfares and the great centres, and not into far-off boulevards and shabby half-populated neighbourhoods. The great drawback, for instance, of the Metropolitan Line is, that it runs far away from the points to which West Enders are mainly bound. Watch the lines of omnibuses, and where they gather thickest there the pulse of population throbs the fullest.

We hear people expressing horror at the idea of a railway station at Regent's Circus. Of course, if it were proposed to run trains, or even to open an underground station, in the centre of this crowded thoroughfare, the scheme might justly be pronounced absurd. But would it be supposed, from the outcry, that the plan is to clear away an open space for a station in the frowsy cholera district lying between

Queen Street and Brewer Street, near to Golden Square, in order to put the many great roads that debouch close upon this spot in railway communication with the Great Northern station and the northern district of the town?

Go near to the great centres of traffic! Of course they do, just as fishermen make for the densest part of a shoal of herrings for railway companies are but fishers of men. Then, again, we hear loud complaints against the route of the Kensington, Knightsbridge, and Mid-London line, because it proposes to run from the Great Western station, under Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, and under Piccadilly to Leicester Square, and so on.

Now, if there has been one road more demanded than another by the public voice, it has been one through these public parks, which, as far as public carriages are concerned, divide in half two of the most important portions of the town night and day, and during the hours of darkness even pedestrians.

We know an underground line would do all that the public needs, and leave the greensward intact; yet the scheme is denounced, because for a short time it may necessitate some unsightly earth-heaps appearing there. A great sewer may be driven at a vast depth, and with infinite mess, along the same route, but a tunnel for the circulation of the people rouses an indignant population of objectors.

If we kept our public spaces as well as they do abroadplanting them with shrubs, and laying them out with flowerbeds and public fountains, into which the public had a free right of entry-the cry of those who are for protecting our open spaces would be tenfold more reasonable than it now is, considering that we lock up our squares, and rigidly exclude the "great unwashed" from touching its sooty and desolate-looking sod. If our open spaces are to be anything more than the "potatoes and point" of the Irish peasanttheir flavour only to be enjoyed in imagination—we do not see that the public have so very much to lose by their appropriation, here and there, as railway-stations.

There is one argument, however, on the part of those who are frightened at finding the metropolis threatened with being carried by the railway companies by assault-an argument, by-the-by, which even the Times has not hesitated to use,—namely, that "cities are meant to live in," and not to be cut and carved about by railway companies.

Now, that cities are made to live in seems a very obvious truth, but in reality sometimes it is not a truth at all. The city of London, for instance, is almost wholly deserted at night; the railway companies and the omnibuses every evening disperse the vast crowd to surburban houses, and return it in the morning.

This attraction and repulsion from the central heart is going on year by year with redoubled force, and the end of it will be that railways, instead of condensing and compressing human beings together by reason of the room they take up, will spread the population over an area twentyfold the size they at present occupy. The time will come, no doubt, when London proper will consist of a series of vast suburbs connected by railroads with a central business district.

Foreseeing this tendency of the time so clearly, we cannot but smile at the fears of those who apprehend that railways are about to exclude every mouthful of fresh air left to us. There are certain classes of the population who must be, at all times we suppose, resident citizens; and they will get more air in consequence of the flight of the wealthier portion of the population towards the suburbs; but we by no means apprehend that large portions of the working population are necessitated to dwell close to their work.

In our opinion, the Legislature should exercise its authority over the railway companies in the direction of obliging them to run early and late trains at such times and prices as would meet the means and needs of the working classes, rather than begrudge them station space, in order to conserve the wretched dwellings that Lord Shaftesbury's "tailors and shoemakers" now inhabit, at a rent far higher, considering their accommodation, than his lordship and his class pay for their own houses in the comparatively pure air of the West End.

ADVERTISING.

It is high time that the art of Advertising should form an important element of education at our commercial academies. Of what consequence is it to a youth who is destined to become an energetic member of the clothing profession, or a pushing grocer, or a cutting baker, that he should load his mind with items of Roman history, or rack his memory with that promiscuous number of questions and answers Miss Mangnall has left behind her to the misery of schoolboys?

The first duty of a tradesman is to puff his goods, and the boy that is to be brought up to trade should be carefully inducted into the art and mystery of doing this in the most skilful and original manner. Mr. William Smith, acting-manager of the Adelphi, should be elected the first professor of this art, for he has just published a little work in which he very clearly sets forth that the chief use of all created things is to serve as an eligible medium for advertising. He would stick a poster on the moon if he could reach it, whilst nothing is too small in his eyes as an advertising agent. Let us quote from his pen a familiar example :

"The trays used for taking in grogs, or the stouts, could be turned into an advertising medium by having a centre and several divisions, like the spokes of a wheel, and enclosed in a circular margin. The rim, the centre, and every one of the several divisions could contain an advertisement either painted on or prepared with rice paper, and the same, paid by the advertiser, would leave a good profit over the expense of the tray manufactured in Birmingham."

Mr. Smith, like Napoleon, is too great a genius to be in the slightest degree influenced by the inconvenience his