Page:The government of London.djvu/8



history furnishes no parallel to the increase of wealth and population in the valley of the Thames during the present century. The metropolis has never been recognized in law as one town, and its boundaries have never been fixed by enactment or custom. In every direction outside the City gates, dwellings, at first sparsely, then thickly, and at last densely, have risen up, until the parishes "without the walls" and "in the fields" have become as fully peopled as Bishopsgate or Eastcheap.

In 1831 the metropolis of the census comprised 78,029 acres from Hampstead to Wandsworth, and from Stepney to Fulham—fifteen miles by twelve. In 1851, civic and suburban London contained 305,933 dwellings, and more than two millions of people with ratable property assessed at £9,964,343 a year. Since then the number of habitations has not, indeed, kept pace with that of property or population, but has increased twenty-five per cent., while these have more than doubled. Such an aggregation of intelligent and active communities, possessed of so much opulence, yet restless with so many wants, nowhere else exists in Christendom. How comes it, then, that nowhere else is urban life so inorganic, that nowhere else are the thews and sinews of local rule developed so imperfectly? A quarter of a century has elapsed since the first attempt was made to reduce to anything like uniformity of system the local institutions of London. Without the semblance of ground-plan, unity of design, or bond of cohesion, several great towns had grown up contiguously on either bank of the Thames between Battersea and Blackwall.