I am sure there must be many to whom the idea occurs at such times of
the year as this, at the end of the season, when people are scattering
out of London, that friends are leaving whom we would like to have had
the time to have seen before they went. How often, looking over the
pages of one's address book, one says, "I wonder how it is I have not
seen So-and-so for an age," and one feels that people we used to enjoy
meeting, if they do not happen to move in the same orbit of
metropolitan existence, are vanishing from our ken. They are being
lost in the Limbo of long distances. An hour of Underground in very
hot weather may give the remoteness of Styx-ferryage.
It would be nice even to be able to speak to one's friends who are not
conveniently visitable. In other cities this is possible, but not
here. The telephone service of an American town or a Norwegian village
is a thing of which London has never got even sufficient sample-taste
to realise what she is deprived of, or what she ought very reasonably
to demand. There is no reason why London should remain telephonically
deaf and dumb. There is nothing which strikes the visitor more
forcibly, however, than the long-suffering patience of the Londoner.
The exasperatingly slow, inefficient apology for a telephone service
that would not be tolerated anywhere else is good enough for London.
It is no excuse to plead in apology the great size of the City, when
there is the example of New York before one, where there are more
telephones, where they are cheaper, and where the average time to get
into communication with another subscriber appears to be a third or a
fourth of the time taken in London. It is only when one has had actual
experience of a thoroughly telephoned town that one appreciates the
convenience of it. Look what it means for saving time in shopping,
doing business, making appointments, and speaking to one's friends. "I
got a telephone put right into my room the day I arrived," said an
American friend, "but the people I want to speak to most often don't
seem to use them, and it is so darned slow getting on to those that do
that now I am keeping a cab by the day; it is quicker in the end, and
makes me swear less."
It will only be a matter of time, and that not so very far off, when
wireless telegraphy will replace the telephone. The principle of
sending messages in a multiplicity of keys, so that a message sent
will only be received on the instrument keyed for it, has been
established, and only requires practical working out. Until that time
London will probably have to remain as deaf and dumb as it is.
As regards getting from one part to another, it is not a cheerful
thing to contemplate that what should be the most agreeable way of
traversing London--I mean the pathway of the river--should just now be
closed, and while Mr. Yerkes looks out on it from his offices in the
Hotel Cecil, Londoners have to look to him to see if he or Pierpont
Morgan will not open it to them again. What a pleasant alternative
from the asphyxiating Underground or the tortoise-moving omnibus would
not a fast, comfortably fitted line of river steamers be! It seems
inconceivable that, with such a waterway and such primitive and
inadequate alternative means of travel, the people should stand its
being closed. What a great, stimulating, suggestive pathway it is
through the Dingy City! Coming from a dance early the other morning I
walked along the Embankment, to see a carpet of blue and silver being
laid along the river as if by the angels of the dawn; and at evening
in ever-varying schemes of sometimes gorgeous colour a richer carpet
is laid sunsetwards, while the smoke and dust exhalation of the City
is glorified to an incense offering by the stained rose window to the
west. At such times the Dingy City looks great, robed in vague
organ-tones of colour. But you must no longer walk on that carpet,
even though the angels have laid it for you; you must no longer see
your city from that pathway; you must burrow homewards from your work
in a sewer-pipe of stink, and deeper rabbit-warrens of burrowing are
being prepared for you, and you have no Declaration of Independence
that secures to you the undeniable right to breathe fresh air.
Long-suffering, patient Londoner! To whom does the City belong, and
the river? If you reward with honours the men who make beer or whisky
for you, or supply you with cheap tea, or signalise themselves by
successfully struggling against disease, there ought to be the
inducement of honours and reward waiting for the man or men that would
help the millions in their daily struggle with this plague of long
distances. Is there no knight to champion the cause of the toilers of
London and in earnest tackle this dragon problem of distances? That
is left to enterprising Americans who come over from pure philanthropy
(?) to help you. Three years of his life are spent by the
average-lived Londoner in the Underground, who has to take a daily
half-hour's journey in it to get to his business. A man with an office
in the neighbourhood of the Stock Exchange and a dwelling-house in
South Kensington will spend about four or five years of his life going
to and fro. To an extent it is a necessary evil. We cannot transport
ourselves by telegraph, but there are things that the people of the
largest city in the world might reasonably expect. They might expect
to have as good facilities for getting about as the people of the most
progressive cities in the world; they might expect to have the power
to speak when they will with the same quickness, cheapness, and
facility as people of other cities. But there is a dull feeling of
resigned apathy about them. They will not insist on making any one
"get a move on" them to get these things done; will no more think of
hustling themselves than a cab-horse in a growler hired by the hour.
If London may be considered the head--the brain of the Empire--the
blood-circulation of that brain is surely of vital importance. When
keen competitors seize every time-saving, labour-saving weapon as it
is offered to help them in the conquest of trade, can we afford to do
without them? The business methods of twenty years ago will not do for
to-day, still less will they do for twenty years to come. The methods
which our competitors are practising are what will tell, and they
cannot be imitated and acquired in a hurry when their importance will
become suddenly alarmingly apparent. I think the position is far more
serious than the stay-at-home Englishman realises. Perhaps from these
passing years the future historian will get material for the opening
chapters of his work on "British Trade: its Decline and Fall."