Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 2.djvu/59

Rh residing in London with their families, a great part of their money and substance was drawn away from the several counties whence it arose, "and spent in the city on excess of apparel, provided from foreign parts, to the enriching of other nations, and the unnecessary consumption of a great part of the treasure of this realm, and in other vain delights and expenses, even to the wasting of their estates." The practice, it is added, also drew great numbers of loose and idle people to London and Westminster, which thereby were not so easily governed as formerly; besides that the poor-rates were increased, and the price of provisions enhanced. Much of all this wisdom of our ancestors is sufficiently absurd; but in regard to the point last touched upon here it is but fair to remember, that, from the difficulties of conveyance between one part of the country and another, any extraordinary accumulation of people upon one spot was in those days reasonably regarded with more alarm, for the pressure it might occasion upon the local provision-market, than it would be now, when the whole kingdom is in a manner but one market. Still, no doubt, the right way to treat the inconvenience was, as with all such mere economic tendencies, to leave it to correct itself.

Howel, in his Londinopolis, published in 1657, observes that the Union of the two crowns of England and Scotland, by the accession of James in 1603, conduced not a little to unite also the two cities of London and Westminster, which were once above a mile asunder; "for," says he, "the Scots, greatly multiplying here, nestled themselves about the court; so that the Strand, from the mud walls and thatched cottages, acquired that perfection of buildings it now possesses." Some years after James's accession, however, we find St. Giles's-in-the-Fields still spoken of, in an act of parliament for paving it, as a town separate from the capital: it and the lane called Drury Lane, leading from it to the Strand, are described in the act as "of late years, by occasion of the continual road there, and often carriages, become deep, foul, and dangerous to all that pass those ways."