CHAPTER III.

HIVE OF BEES AND DROP OF WATER VARIETIES OF LIFECURIOUS VIEWS OF GREAT CITIES IN THE OLDEN TIME-SITES OF CITIES WORDSWORTH CITIES AND HUMAN PROGRESS LUXURY OF NATURE OPPOSED TO THEIR GROWTH-ASIATIC LIFE FREEDOM OF GRECIAN COMMERCE - HOLLAND- ENGLISH MANUFACTURES-MODERN POLITICAL ECONOMY-IMPORTANCE OF THE RESTORATION OF CONFIDENCE BETWEEN EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED-ILLUSTRATIVE ANECDOTES IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION-DENSITY OF POPULATION-QUOTATION FROM COLTON -NATURAL THEOLOGY OF A GREAT CITY PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEWS OF THE CITY-EVILS-ITS VANITY-SCEPTICISM-INDEPENDENCE DOGMATISM EASE OF MENTAL TRANSMISSIONADVANTAGE OF CONDENSED POPULATION-FEATURES OF LONDON -LIVERPOOL MANCHESTER -CIRCUMSTANCES OF PHYSICAL MISERY AND DETERIORATION-FEVER BILL OF GLASGOW-LIGHT -HOUSE ACCOMMODATION-JOHN MILTON-GROWTH OF POPULATIONS UNEXPECTED-COMPARISONS-ROME-TYRE-NECESSITY FOR ATTENTION TO THE EVILS OF CITIES-THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE.

Two things, I make no doubt, thou and I my friend have both looked upon with some considerable interest -a hive of bees; we took good care to contemplate it at a distance-we heard the roar and the buzz within the hive. Perhaps, if looking through a glass hive you saw the great business-transactions of the waxen city; what a noisy crowding in and out at the gate what a tumult; the carriers regularly returning to deposit their produce in the cell of that little municipia; the unladen wings starting off on fresh enterprise to distant woods and cottage gardens ; spreading the tiny sail over lake, and river, and brook; carrying on a sort of free-trade with distant

colonies of wild flowers, in the dingle or the hedgerow, singing a drowsy music during the whole of their cheerful labour the long day, till tired and spent they returned with evening to the hive. Or, I dare say, you have watched the curious pranks and battlings of those unsightly reptiles in a drop of stagnant water, revealed to us by the oxy-hydrogen microscope. How quietly to you every thing went on, yet what a never-ending death in life seemed to be working there. Curious, and but for its moral analogy scarcely painful, to watch the universal pouncing and swallowing. There were two very small fry indeed hard at it; one yielded the contest and resigned himself to be a meal for his more adroit brother of the pool; but scarce had he finished his meal when there came along a sly, quiet, country-lawyer-like sort of tadpole, and took the conqueror for his own particular share. And amongst the large proprietors of the watery domain the same battling went on, the same alternate eating and being eaten, the same conquest and defeat; so that one could not but say, looking on the drop of water, "How very human." Both hive and waterdrop are marvellously like a great city-they have an aspect truly benevolent and truly selfish; and perhaps, some would say, hive, water-drop, and city, bear much about the same relation to, and are equally important in, the great universe of being.

The Great City is the first and most prominent feature of our times-it is the most remarkable result of the architecture of the age; in its turn it is a marvellous architect. Life there presents its most

animating and death-like pictures; varieties of existence crowd there-horror and beauty sit side by side, -there every day is the calm and quiet heroism, and there too is the unseen and untracked crime, the exalted action that meets its reward of praise, and the notorious crime to be expiated only by fearful punishment. There labour plies its thousand shuttles and weaves its many hues, there man preys on man, deems his brother only a ball on the great billiard-table of life, and gambles with affections and hopes and existences, as if all were valueless,—there is the devout song and the submissive prayer,—and there too is the constant plotting, the everlasting scheming, the endeavour to outshine, the petty vanity, the cruel persecution, the helpless, hopeless poverty, lying down to die. Look at the city from afar, does it not seem a hive, making all nations tributary to it, and its universal industry; comes not its many-voiced noise up to the ear like the murmur of a vast brotherhood of bees? Still look at it from afar, or even inspect it near, does it not seem like the stagnant drop, where each citizen preys on each with the eager unsatisfied appetite of injustice and fraud; where man the biped approximates to the centipede, and spreads out a thousand tentacula of cruelty.

There is a curious moral reflection in the ethics of Aristotle. "In like manner," he says, "as a city cannot subsist if it either have so few inhabitants* as ten, or so many as a hundred thousand, so is there a mediocrity required in the number of friends, and

* Book IX. chapter x. His expression is av0pwπos, inhabitant, not πoλirns, citizen.

you destroy the essence of friendship by running into either extreme." It seems remarkable that Aristotle should never have seen a city with a hundred thousand inhabitants, and is one of many proofs that the ancient cities were not only not more populous, but much less so than ours; indeed in all ages the idea seems to have prevailed, that "a great city was a great evil;" and an opinion there is amongst us also, that our cities are not ornaments to the nation, but great wens, unsightly and unnatural, and only to be regarded as necessary evils. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, a proclamation was issued, prohibiting any new buildings within three miles of London. The preamble is in the following words :-"That foreseeing the great and manifold inconveniences and mischiefs that daily grow, and are likely to increase in the city and suburbs of London, by confluence of people to inhabit the same, not only by reason that such multitudes can hardly be governed to serve God and obey her Majesty, without constituting an addition of new officers and enlarging their authority, but also can hardly be provided of food and other necessaries at a reasonable price; and, finally, that as such multitudes of people, many of them poor, who must live by begging or worse means, are heaped up together, and in a sort smothered, with so many children and servants in one house or small tenement: it must needs follow, if any plague or other universal sickness come amongst them, that it would presently spread through the whole city and confines, and also into all parts of the realm."

The times and social appearance of England have undergone wonderful alteration since this proclamation was issued; perhaps its principal folly is in its being a proclamation. Some of the objections stated in the preamble are suggestive enough, yet what knew they of cities during the reign of Elizabeth; how marvellously in obedience to the demands of the ages have cities sprung up from the waste,-spots where once no stir of life was heard, where only occasionally the knightly hunter passed, where the hermit or the lone wanderer now and then forced their way through brake and brushwood, where only the splash of the torrent was heard in the times of the Tudors or Plantagenets, where crag or forest only gave back echo to the cawing rook or the screaming kite; on these places are now congregated the homes of thousands and hundreds of thousands of our great population; and what has called them into existence? Industry, industry alone. Never were trade and manufactures so flourishing in former ages as in England now. David Hume says, "I do not remember a passage in any ancient author where the growth of a city is ascribed to the establishment of a manufacture. The commerce which is said to have flourished, is chiefly the exchange of those commodities for which different soils and climates were suited."* The foundation of the riches of Agrigentium was the sale of the wine and oil of Africa; the immense populousness of the city of Sybaris is traced to its situation near

*I refer my reader to the elaborate and highly interesting essay of Hume "on the Populousness of Ancient Nations."