Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/162

 effect, with our own great ocean cut, which, quitting the embanked and deepened Thames at lower London, passed off southwards direct to the open sea, thus leaving the Calais-Dover narrows, and their vicinities to north and south, to the reclamation projects of those times, which eventually restored that terra firma between us and continental Europe, which geologists before assured us had been filched from us and our neighbours by our once restless and invading but now subdued old enemy, the sea.

Many considerations were conjoined in demanding the concentration of the public offices in some one suitable situation, and their removal from the denser parts of city life. Not the least of these considerations was the possibility thereby, through swift and incessant railway connection, of bringing every citizen practically nearer to each and all the offices, than was possible under the old scattering system, by which every public office seemed, as though by natural electric repulsion, to keep as inconveniently far from its fellows as possible. But there would have been no chance whatever for so novel and disturbing an idea to dislodge us from the habitual old groove, had it not been for the arousing effects of the unavoidable demolition of most of our public offices, in common with the countless other structures which collapsed under the great resanitation procedure. When the