Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/150



When one looks back upon smoky, dingy, old London, as it existed prior to the grand resanitation, or, more properly, the sanitary reconstruction, so successfully entered upon before the close of this century, and realizes once more not only its extirpated fever dens, and its ejected gas and sewage-poisoned soil, but all the obstruction of its narrow, tortuous, and dark ways, in the very busiest parts of the city, it does seem a marvel how our ancestors bore with it all so long. Habit is indeed a wonderful reconciler; but none the less could the citizens appreciate the paradise into which they emerged, through the radically reconstructive changes I am about to record. Nor were we one moment too early in the field, when we began our great work; for the spirit of progress and improvement of the time was already seriously expending itself upon the old and utterly unsuitable lines of the original city. Every year of such work only increased, of course, the difficulties of a general undoing; for an undoing, root and branch, was finally decided upon as entirely indispensable.

No doubt the great Paris reconstruction, which had been continuously at work for more than a generation before we began in earnest with London, had stimulated us by its example. In the emulative race that