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148 doubt, be enormous, but the implacement of labour will be yet greater. A few may be made comparatively poor, but the many will be made comparatively rich—a very healthy change, the slight evils attending which society will be well able to mitigate.

There are already visible symptoms of the coming change—rumblings which precede the earthquake. London at this very moment may be said to be on strike against its landowners. Long-desired London improvements are awaiting such a change in the law as will throw some of the cost of making them upon the landowners of London. Railways are projected, but in some cases are not built—for instance, The Epping Forest Railway—because the London County Council, most properly anxious to keep down the fares by workmen's trains, press for and secure, at the hands of a Parliamentary Committee, the imposition of terms upon the promoters which seem to them extremely onerous and unremunerative, but which would pay the company extremely well were it not for the prohibitive price asked for land and other property along the line of its projected route. These checks upon enterprise must affect the growth of London even now, and make it less rapid than it otherwise would be; but when the untold treasures of our land are unlocked, and when the people now living in London discover how easily vested interests, without being attacked, may be circumvented, then the landowners of London and those who represent other vested interests had better quickly make terms, or London, besides being what Mr. Grant Allen termed "a squalid village," will also become a deserted one.

But better counsels, let us hope, will prevail, and a