Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/117

 tion of London, a work which, in its main result, as we shall shortly see, was successfully carried through, as anticipated, in about a third of a century, although partially protracted, in view of certain other objects, for some time longer. But even greater than this great project, and necessarily protracted in its redemptive operation for a much longer interval, was the magnificent work of the embankment and reclamation of the Lower Thames, by which English soil acquired an accession of some hundreds of square miles, at a comparative trifle of concurrent outlay; the cost having eventually been mainly defrayed by the said advance in value due to a busy century of national progress.

These special trust enterprises involved, of course, a vast outlay of ready money at the first. The source of supply lay in the successive issue of trust stocks, which stocks, for several reasons at the time, came to be quite adequately, and, indeed, often greedily competed for in the expanding money market of those days. First, there was the effect of the full confidence, which soon came to be felt by the public, in the soundness of the principle of these trusts. Second, the vast and constantly increasing amount of savings' bank, insurance, and other funds, had provided a corresponding demand for just such a class of investments as these stocks then offered. The reserve funds of the many insurance companies, for instance, ere the nineteenth century was out, had reached, in not a few cases, to twenty millions each and upwards, and in the course of the twentieth to even a hundred millions each. Lastly, there was concurrently also, about this time, the continual