Broad-street, all save the cab journeys of those
who formerly travelled to the northern and
western stations; but then again they also create
cab and omnibus traffic by the new tribe of
season-ticket holders whom they call into existence.
Very soon, if the ravages of financial crashes
do not extend beyond present calculation,
Finsbury and Farringdon stations will represent
links of a chain moving perpetually round London,
with regular stoppages of omnibus trains
at the Tower and Cannon-street, Blackfriars,
Westminster, Pimlico, South Kensington,
Kensington proper, and so on to Notting-hill and
back to the City—a circle of which it may be
prophesied that it will create at least as much
traffic as it consumes, probably more. As part
and partner of this omnibus line is the roadway
of the Thames Embankment, stretching from
Chelsea to Blackfriars New Bridge, and forming
the origin of a new street which is to cross
Cannon-street and open a clear roadway to the
Bank. There the additional multitude produced
by the convenience is to find its way as
best it can through narrow crowded streets
leading from the Bank to the south and to
the east.

And here let us do justice to the memory
of a man who was the true editor, though
not the author, of metropolitan railways—a
man who had ambition and invention enough
to be at once the Napoleon and Haussman
of City improvements—Charles Pearson—
if he could only have found a Chancellor of
Exchequer. Charles Pearson devised a
gigantic central station for all the railways of
London—wonderfully ingenious and perfectly
impracticable, for to get to and from such
station would have required an open area
counted in tens of acres. But the impossible
led him to the possible. Taking up the
cause of the Subterranean Railway, he
succeeded in inoculating the slow-debating, often-
feeding, and seldom-doing Common Council of
London, with his enthusiasm; and he made them,
by a timely subscription of two hundred
thousand pounds in shares, resurrectionise and
galvanise into life the then more than half-dead
and quite insolvent Underground Railway.
The legality of the transaction has been often
disputed; of its wisdom as a piece of bold
municipal administration there can be no more
question than of its financial success. A
wilderness in Clerkenwell made valuable, and
a profit realised on the opening of the line
which defrayed all the City splendour, feasting,
and largesse, attendant on the wedding
of the Prince of Wales. Charles Pearson
was a man of great eloquence, but it was
commonly said that he owed his success on
this question, greatly to his knowledge of
the art of dining, and of after-dinner conversation.
Therefore there was something suitable
in expending on feasting what had been
extracted at feasts.

The Corporation of London was apparently
exhausted by this effort of wise enterprise, and
until very lately satisfied with going through
the forms of its little parliament—little for a
parliament, but large for a City council—and
performing its usual duties of a mutual admiration,
toast-proposing society.

It would be strange if two hundred and
seventy-five councillors, administering a square
mile of houses, and assisted by seventy-five
commissioners, did not fall back on talk, to
show their respective value; for what could
so many do, in real work? But the speech-
makers of Guildhall were stimulated into
action by the invasions of their West-end rivals,
the Metropolitan Board, with its Thames
Embankment, and new street to the Mansion
House.

The site chosen for action was Holborn
valley. The project for widening that instrument
of torture to horses in harness had for
forty years and more been under the consideration
of the Corporation—longer even than the
brick wilderness of Clerkenwell and Farringdon.
With unusual activity, racing against their
formidable competitors, they put themselves
under the professional guidance of an engineer
borrowed for the occasion from the Commissioners
of Sewers—Mr. William Haywood—to
whom every street and alley, drain and sewer,
of London was familiar as the books in his
library. Parliamentary powers were soon
obtained to clear away the existing streets, and,
by a viaduct, to make a level roadway from St.
Andrew's, Holborn, to Newgate Prison, with
access from the thoroughfares intersected
below.

After the usual delay, and an almost comic
contest on the question whether or not an official
plan of vague and uncertain cost, eccentric
character, great taste on paper, and perfectly
unpracticable, or the design of the engineer
before named with a certain saving of a hundred
thousand pounds, should be selected, common
sense and economy carried the day in the face of
that horror of common councilmen, "a paid
officer admitted to be wiser than a committee."
William Haywood having been specially engaged
to carry out his original design, this viaduct is
now in steady progress.

Soon after the plan of the Holborn Viaduct
had been placed in the hands of the contractors,
it occurred to the Commissioners of Sewers
(which is a sort of overgrown committee of
works, of ancient pedigree), that while both
the Corporation and the Metropolitan Board
of Works were working hard to make the ways
between the west of the metropolis and the
centre of the City easy of access, nothing had
been done to let the crowds out, east and
south. The result was a report* from the
engineer, to which we are indebted for our
figures, and in which the difficulties and
necessities of the City, and the essential and
not to be deferred remedies, are plainly set
down.

* Report to the Honourable Commissioners of
Sewers on the Traffic and Improvements in the
Public Ways of the City of London.