Page:The government of London.djvu/19

 beyond compare the noblest improvement in the realm accomplished during the present century. Diligent, persevering, and ambitious, it has gained a position amongst us more influential, undoubtedly, than any other institution of our time. The formation of great thoroughfares, and the widening of overcrowded streets, proceeded more tardily than impatience could be made to understand; for it is not so easy to do great good as those may imagine who have never had the opportunity to try.

Compulsory expropriation of property in towns is about the most invidious and expensive duty which a public body can be set to perform. It is morally impossible to guard it effectually from being made conducive to personal gain in a subordinate degree; hopeless to save it from the imputation of furtive and base motives in those who are concerned in promoting it. Berkeley House has not been proof against the pitiless gusts of scandal that intermittently sweep over society, maiming reputations that seemed to have strength of stem and depth of root enough to withstand them while passing harmlessly over the willows that offer no resistance to their rage. Additional powers have from time to time been conceded by Parliament, which, far from satisfying, seem only to have stimulated the Board's desire for more: until the conviction has become general that it has already quite as much on hand as it can well do. Hence the signal unanimity in rejecting an elaborate scheme two years ago, by which it expected confidently to be enabled to buy out or supersede the existing water companies, and thus enormously to increase its authority and patronage.

Mutual jealousies at first existed between it and the City. But the sagacity of youth and the shrewdness of age gradually came to understand each other. Reciprocal hospitalities and courtesies led by degrees to interchange of confidence, and at length good understanding. Each has found more than enough to do advantageously, without infringing the domain of the other. Occasionally it still happens that their pretensions clash; and in the newspapers, or the lobby, there are now and then passages of arms, that to the uninitiated look like the outbreak of repressed hostility: but next day the credulous of quarrel learn that all has been arranged, and that the prospect of civic war "is barren all from Dan to Beer-