The Parks of London.—The Police.
London, _June_ 24, 1845.
Nothing can be more striking to one who is accustomed to the little
inclosures called public parks in our American cities, than the spacious,
open grounds of London. I doubt, in fact, whether any person fully
comprehends their extent, from any of the ordinary descriptions of them,
until he has seen them or tried to walk over them. You begin at the east
end of St. James's Park, and proceed along its graveled walks, and its
colonnades of old trees, among its thickets of ornamental shrubs carefully
inclosed, its grass-plots maintained in perpetual freshness and verdure by
the moist climate and the ever-dropping skies, its artificial sheets of
water covered with aquatic birds of the most beautiful species, until you
begin almost to wonder whether the park has a western extremity. You reach
it at last, and proceed between the green fields of Constitution Hill,
when you find yourself at the corner of Hyde Park, a much more spacious
pleasure-ground. You proceed westward in Hyde Park until you are weary,
when you find yourself on the verge of Kensington Gardens, a vast extent
of ancient woods and intervening lawns, to which the eye sees no limit,
and in whose walks it seems as if the whole population of London might
lose itself. North of Hyde Park, after passing a few streets, you reach
the great square of Regent's Park, where, as you stand at one boundary the
other is almost undistinguishable in the dull London atmosphere. North of
this park rises Primrose Hill, a bare, grassy eminence, which I hear has
been purchased for a public ground and will be planted with trees. All
round these immense inclosures, presses the densest population of the
civilized world. Within, such is their extent, is a fresh and pure
atmosphere, and the odors of plants and flowers, and the twittering of
innumerable birds more musical than those of our own woods, which build
and rear their young here, and the hum of insects in the sunshine. Without
are close and crowded streets, swarming with foot-passengers, and choked
with drays and carriages.
These parks have been called the lungs of London, and so important are
they regarded to the public health and the happiness of the people, that I
believe a proposal to dispense with some part of their extent, and cover
it with streets and houses, would be regarded in much the same manner as a
proposal to hang every tenth man in London. They will probably remain
public grounds as long as London has an existence.
The population of your city, increasing with such prodigious rapidity;
your sultry summers, and the corrupt atmosphere generated in hot and
crowded streets, make it a cause of regret that in laying out New York, no
preparation was made, while it was yet practicable, for a range of parks
and public gardens along the central part of the island or elsewhere, to
remain perpetually for the refreshment and recreation of the citizens
during the torrid heats of the warm season. There are yet unoccupied lands
on the island which might, I suppose, be procured for the purpose, and
which, on account of their rocky and uneven surface, might be laid out
into surpassingly beautiful pleasure-grounds; but while we are discussing
the subject the advancing population of the city is sweeping over them and
covering them from our reach.
If we go out of the parks into the streets we find the causes of a corrupt
atmosphere much more carefully removed than with us. The streets of London
are always clean. Every day, early in the morning, they are swept; and
some of them, I believe, at other hours also, by a machine drawn by one of
the powerful dray-horses of this country. Whenever an unusually large and
fine horse of this breed is produced in the country, he is sent to the
London market, and remarkable animals they are, of a height and stature
almost elephantine, large-limbed, slow-paced, shaggy-footed, sweeping the
ground with their fetlocks, each huge foot armed with a shoe weighing from
five to six pounds. One of these strong creatures is harnessed to a
street-cleaning machine, which consists of brushes turning over a cylinder
and sweeping the dust of the streets into a kind of box. Whether it be wet
or dry dust, or mud, the work is thoroughly performed; it is all drawn
into the receptacle provided for it, and the huge horse stalks backward
and forward along the street until it is almost as clean as a
drawing-room.
I called the other day on a friend, an American, who told me that he had
that morning spoken with his landlady about her carelessness in leaving
the shutters of her lower rooms unclosed during the night. She answered
that she never took the trouble to close them, that so secure was the city
from ordinary burglaries, under the arrangements of the new police, that
it was not worth the trouble. The windows of the parlor next to my
sleeping-room open upon a rather low balcony over the street door, and
they are unprovided with any fastenings, which in New York we should think
a great piece of negligence. Indeed, I am told that these night robberies
are no longer practiced, except when the thief is assisted by an accessary
in the house. All classes of the people appear to be satisfied with the
new police. The officers are men of respectable appearance and respectable
manners. If I lose my way, or stand in need of any local information, I
apply to a person in the uniform of a police officer. They are sometimes
more stupid in regard to these matters than there is any occasion for,
but it is one of the duties of their office to assist strangers with local
information.
Begging is repressed by the new police regulations, and want skulks in
holes and corners, and prefers its petitions where it can not be overheard
by men armed with the authority of the law. "There is a great deal of
famine in London," said a friend to me the other day, "but the police
regulations drive it out of sight." I was going through Oxford-street
lately, when I saw an elderly man of small stature, poorly dressed, with a
mahogany complexion, walking slowly before me. As I passed him he said in
my ear, with a hollow voice, "I am starving to death with hunger," and
these words and that hollow voice sounded in my ear all day.
Walking in Hampstead Heath a day or two since, with an English friend, we
were accosted by two laborers, who were sitting on a bank, and who said
that they had came to that neighborhood in search of employment in
hay-making, but had not been able to get either work or food. My friend
appeared to distrust their story. But in the evening, as we were walking
home, we passed a company of some four or five laborers in frocks, with
bludgeons in their hands, who asked us for something to eat. "You see how
it is, gentlemen," said one of them, "we are hungry; we have come for
work, and nobody will hire us; we have had nothing to eat all day." Their
tone was dissatisfied, almost menacing; and the Englishman who was with
us, referred to it several times afterward, with an expression of anxiety
and alarm.
I hear it often remarked here, that the difference of condition between
the poorer and the richer classes becomes greater every day, and what the
end will be the wisest pretend not to foresee.
Letter XXII.
Edinburgh.
Edinburgh, _July_ 17, 1845.
I had been often told, since I arrived in England, that in Edinburgh, I
should see the finest city I ever saw. I confess that I did not feel quite
sure of this, but it required scarcely more than a single look to show me
that it was perfectly true. It is hardly possible to imagine a nobler site
for a town than that of Edinburgh, and it is built as nobly. You stand on
the edge of the deep gulf which separates the old and the new town, and
before you on the opposite bank rise the picturesque buildings of the
ancient city—
"Piled deep and massy, close and high,"
looking, in their venerable and enduring aspect, as if they were parts of
the steep bank on which they stand, an original growth of the rocks; as
if, when the vast beds of stone crystallized from the waters, or cooled
from their fusion by fire, they formed themselves by some freak of nature
into this fantastic resemblance of the habitations of men. To the right
your eyes rest upon a crag crowned with a grand old castle of the middle
ages, on which guards are marching to and fro; and near you to the left,
rises the rocky summit of Carlton Hill, with its monuments of the great
men of Scotland. Behind you stretch the broad streets of the new town,
overlooked by massive structures, built of the stone of the Edinburgh
quarries, which have the look of palaces.
"Streets of palaces and walks of slate,"
form the new town. Not a house of brick or wood exists in Edinburgh; all
are constructed of the excellent and lasting stone which the earth
supplies almost close to their foundations. High and solid bridges of this
material, with broad arches, connect the old town with the new, and cross
the deep ravine of the Cowgate in the old town, at the bottom of which you
see a street between prodigiously high buildings, swarming with the poorer
population of Edinburgh.
From almost any of the eminences of the town you see spread below you its
magnificent bay, the Frith of Forth, with its rocky islands; and close to
the old town rise the lofty summits of Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crag, a
solitary, silent, mountainous district, without habitations or inclosures,
grazed by flocks of sheep. To the west flows Leith-water in its deep
valley, spanned by a noble bridge, and the winds of this chilly climate
that strike the stately buildings of the new town, along the cliffs that
border this glen, come from the very clouds. Beyond the Frith lie the
hills of Fifeshire; a glimpse of the blue Grampian ridges is seen where
the Frith contracts in the northwest to a narrow channel, and to the
southwest lie the Pentland hills, whose springs supply Edinburgh with
water. All around you are places the names of which are familiar names of
history, poetry, and romance.
From this magnificence of nature and art, the transition was painful to
what I saw of the poorer population. On Saturday evening I found myself at
the market, which is then held in High-street and the Netherbow, just as
you enter the Canongate, and where the old wooden effigy of John Knox,
with staring black eyes, freshly painted every year, stands in its pulpit,
and still seems preaching to the crowd. Hither a throng of sickly-looking,
dirty people, bringing with them their unhealthy children, had crawled
from the narrow wynds or alleys on each side of the street. We entered
several of these wynds, and passed down one of them, between houses of
vast height, story piled upon story, till we came to the deep hollow of
the Cowgate. Children were swarming in the way, all of them, bred in that
close and impure atmosphere, of a sickly appearance, and the aspect of
premature age in some of them, which were carried in arms, was absolutely
frightful. "Here is misery," said a Scotch gentleman, who was my
conductor. I asked him how large a proportion of the people of Edinbugh
belonged to that wretched and squalid class which I saw before me. "More
than half," was his reply. I will not vouch for the accuracy of his
statistics. Of course his estimate was but a conjecture.
In the midst of this population is a House of Refuge for the Destitute,
established by charitable individuals for the relief of those who may be
found in a state of absolute destitution of the necessaries of life. Here
they are employed in menial services, lodged and fed until they can be
sent to their friends, or employment found for them. We went over the
building, a spacious structure, in the Canongate, of the plainest Puritan
architecture, with wide low rooms, which, at the time of the union of
Scotland with England, served as the mansion of the Duke of Queensbury.
The accommodations of course are of the humblest kind. We were shown into
the sewing-room, where we saw several healthy-looking young women at work,
some of them barefooted. Such of the inmates as can afford it, pay for
their board from three and sixpence to five shillings a week, besides
their labor.
In this part of the city also are the Night Asylums for the Houseless.
Here, those who find themselves without a shelter for the night, are
received into an antechamber, provided with benches, where they first get
a bowl of soup, and are then introduced into a bathing-room, where they
are stripped and scoured. They are next furnished with clean garments and
accommodated with a lodging on an inclined plane of planks, a little
raised from the floor, and divided into proper compartments by strips of
board. Their own clothes are, in the mean time, washed, and returned to
them when they leave the place.
It was a very different spectacle from the crowd in the Saturday evening
market, that met my eyes the next morning in the clean and beautiful
streets of the new town; the throng of well-dressed church-goers passing
each other in all directions. The women, it appeared to me, were rather
gaily dressed, and a large number of them prettier than I had seen in some
of the more southern cities.
I attended worship in one of the Free Churches, as they are called, in
which Dr. Candlish officiates. In the course of his sermon, he read long
portions of an address from the General Assembly of the Free Church of
Scotland, appointing the following Thursday as a day of fasting and
prayer, on account of the peculiar circumstances of the time, and more
especially the dangers flowing from the influence of popery, alluding to
the grant of money lately made by parliament to the Roman Catholic College
at Maynooth. The address proposed no definite opposition, but protested
against the measure in general, and, as it seemed to me, rather vague
terms. In the course of the address the title of National Church was
claimed for the Free Church, notwithstanding its separation from the
government, and the era of that separation was referred to in phrases
similar to those in which we speak of our own declaration of national
independence. There were one or two allusions to the persecutions which
the Free Church had suffered, and something was said about her children
being hunted like partridges upon the mountains; but it is clear that if
her ministers have been hunted, they have been hunted into fine churches;
and if persecuted, they have been persecuted into comfortable livings.
This Free Church, as far as I can learn, is extremely prosperous.
Dr. Candlish is a fervid preacher, and his church was crowded. In the
afternoon I attended at one of the churches of the established or endowed
Presbyterian Church, where a quiet kind of a preacher held forth, and the
congregation was thin.
This Maynooth grant has occasioned great dissatisfaction in England and
Scotland. If the question had been left to be decided by the public
opinion of these parts of the kingdom, the grant would never have been
made. An immense majority, of all classes and almost all denominations,
disapprove of it. A dissenting clergyman of one of the evangelical
persuasions, as they are called, said to me—"The dissenters claim nothing
from the government; they hold that it is not the business of the state to
interfere in religious matters, and they object to bestowing the public
money upon the seminaries of any religious denomination." In a
conversation which I had with an eminent man of letters, and a warm friend
of the English Church, he said: "The government is giving offense to many
who have hitherto been its firmest supporters. There was no necessity for
the Maynooth grant; the Catholics would have been as well satisfied
without it as they are with it; for you see they are already clamoring for
the right to appoint through their Bishops the professors in the new
Irish colleges. The Catholics were already establishing their schools, and
building their churches with their own means: and this act of applying the
money of the nation to the education of their priests is a gratuitous
offense offered by the government to its best friends." In a sermon which
I heard from the Dean of York, in the magnificent old minster of that
city, he commended the liberality of the motives which had induced the
government to make the grant, but spoke of the measure as one which the
friends of the English Church viewed with apprehension and anxiety.
"They may dismiss their fears," said a shrewd friend of mine, with whom I
was discussing the subject. "Endowments are a cause of lukewarmness and
weakness. Our Presbyterian friends here, instead of protesting so
vehemently against what Sir Robert Peel has done, should thank him for
endowing the Catholic Church, for in doing it he has deprived it of some
part of its hold upon the minds of men."
There is much truth, doubtless, in this remark. The support of religion to
be effectual should depend upon individual zeal. The history of the
endowed chapels of dissenting denominations in England is a curious
example of this. Congregations have fallen away and come to nothing, and
it is a general remark that nothing is so fatal to a sect as a liberal
endowment, which provides for the celebration of public worship without
individual contributions.
Letter XXIII.
The Scottish Lakes.
Glasgow, _July_ 19, 1845.