THE LONDON OF TO-DAY.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 752, 30 July 1886, Page 4

THE LONDON OF TO-DAY.

We speak of the rapid changes in our American cities, but nothing like the changes of London can with us. Growth is not a change of this kind. Paris alone, in certain respects, can show such metamorphoses as London. But on the whole, Paris, as I saw it at this first visit to the Old World, was more like the Paris one sees now than was London of 1850 like the London of to-day. The mere question of growth is a minor matter. London was not the metropolis of the world in 1850, and now it is. Then it was only a huge provincial town. The Londoner in general measured nothing but himself, and nobody came to London for anything but hardware, good walking-boots, saddles, etc. ; now it is the entrepdt of the civilised world. The Whrld’s Fair of 18°t and succeeding similar displays of what cosmopolite industry can do, the common arrival of ocean steamers, rare at the time l am writing of, have changed the entire

character of London life and''business and the tone of its society. It is not merely in the fact that 48,000 houses were built iu the capital iu the last year, or that you find colonies of French, Italians, Russians, Greeks in it, but that the houses are no longer what they were, inside or out, and thus the foreigner is an assimilated ingredient in its philosophy. All this has come since 1850.—Atlantic, for May.