THE MART OF NATIONS. BY CYRUS Redding WELCOME HOME. BY J. E. CARPENTER EL LOBO DE LAS SIERRAS. A TALE OF THE CARLIST WARS ALL THE WORLD AND HIS WIFE; OR, WHAT BROUGHT EVERY- BODY TO LONDON IN 1851. BY DUDLEY COSTELLO CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. To whom all Communications for the Editor are to be addressed. REJECTED ARTICLES CANNOT BE RETURNED. SOLD BY ALL BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM. PRINTED BY CHARLES WHITING, BEAUFORT HOUSE, STRAND. NOTICE. NEW SPORTING STORY. YOUNG TOM HALL'S HEART-ACHES AND HORSES will be commenced in the OCTOBER NUMBER of the NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. THE MART OF NATIONS. BY CYRUS REDDING. THE strangers visiting London at the present period will receive a much deeper impress of its importance and magnitude than is likely ever to strike its own citizens. Familiarity with a giant renders less the idea of personal magnitude. Those who have spent the best part of life in this great "miscellany of mortality"-as Tom Brown facetiously called it-those who have been nurtured in its bosom, take all which concerns it as a matter of easiness. It requires novelty to excite them. The state procession of her Majesty to the Hyde Park Exhibition was matter of moment and attracted attention, but that which is not so palpable to the senses, whatever be its relative position or magnitude, remains unobserved. Never was there a time when the great mart of empires was more worthy of observation than at present, now that the arts of peace have made the denizens of all nations its guests. The humanity of a great commercial metropolis is that of the universe epitomised. London, like Tyre of old, is linked with the inhabitants of every region, but how much more vast is its field of action. As an inland sea, as the Mediterranean to the ocean, is the difference between the Syrian city and the modern capital of our island. The inhabitants of the last too must needs rank higher, partaking insensibly in the extended proportions of their city, with the map of the world beneath their feet. They themselves are of different races mingled, a complication of beings as heterogeneous as those in the ark. The animate and inanimate of temperate, torrid, and frigid climes amalgamate within this immense circuit of metropolitan habitations. The peculiarities observable in humanity are often singular and antipathetical; yet here abide whatever the mind can conceive of good and evil, of originality and sameness in character, of all that is to be desired or shunned, loved or feared, praised or despised-intelligence, mediocrity, and ignorance, in one enormous conglomeration. Let us attempt to grasp in mind the circuit of London, and we easily succeed; we have only to imagine a distance of thirty or forty miles, and break it into as many divisions. But how different and confusing is the attempt to go further-to comprehend the large streets and avenues, to sum the buildings in any particular quarter, and to picture the scenes, ever varying, which an hour's walk within its precincts discloses. We become confused and dizzy when we try to muster the streets in their thousands, to reckon the dwellings by hundreds of thousands, and the swarming inhabitants by millions. Imagination will sometimes glide, phantom fashion, over the countless acts that are passing within the metropolitan limits, Aug.-VOL XCII. NO. CCCLXVIII. 2 c among its two millions and a quarter of inhabitants, and the multitudinous activity to be seen within its dwellings, laid bare, until fancy itself is plunged into bewilderment. Yet nothing is more certain, however varied the scenes that would be thus disclosed, that to its utmost borders all is full of life and activity-increasing, uprising, expanding, populating, enriching, pauperising. The thoroughfares present from morning until night the same scenes of toil and bustle, of splendour and misery. Still pleasure wantons, pain writhes, deformity disgusts, trade overreaches, and virtue and vice are ever in conflict. There is no cessation; the stream flows on, and seems as if it is to flow on for ever. The metropolis meanwhile, an enormous specimen of the polypi genus, throws out its arms in all directions, grasping village and hamlet, gathering up plain and hill, making them a prey to its own selfishness, and stretching its desires further like a conqueror insatiate of domination. As to the extension of London no one now dreams of its arrest; no one says, as the Stuarts did vainly, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no further." James I., like his predecessor, ordered that no more houses should be built within three miles of London. Charles I. tried to prevent its augmentation, and prosecutions were ordered by Charles II. against those who dared to build on new foundations. The Stuarts knew that enlarged principles were nursed in cities; that communities of men, through constant intercourse, are led to improvement and to freedom. Within the verge of large cities is generated that spirit of intelligence which is the "healing of nations." Down to so late a period as 1747 and 1754, many expressed their fears that London would become too large; that the head, out of all proportion to the body, would soon afflict the land with metropolitan apoplexy. Country gentlemen were caught by this apprehension at one time, and the higher ranks became apprehensive of losing the impression in their favour, which lingered from old feudal prepossessions among the ignorant. They dreaded encroachment upon hereditary power, for the country people never met except when invited by the lord of the soil. The inhabitants of cities met spontaneously to discuss their affairs; nor was it in England only that the magnates of the land were jealous of the extension of metropolitan cities, for in France similar apprehensions were expressed regarding Paris. We have long resigned such jealousies to the winds. Any who, in the present day, express their apprehension that the metropolis is getting too large, refer only to the inconvenience to social intercourse arising from distance-a serious evil where time is valuable. As much time is expended in going and returning from a visit as the visit itself occupies. Dinner invitations cannot be met by railway motion in streets, and the call is made in the private carriage at a funeral pace, from the crowded state of the thoroughfares. With people of fortune and idleness this loss of time may be better sustained, but with the majority it is not calculated to keep up neighbourliness. After all that can be said on the matter of inconvenience, there must be room in the capital of an immense empire; it must possess full breathing space. London is not the capital of the British isles only; it is the point of concentration of numerous empires, either incipient or established. London is not the head of England's European possessions alone; its vitality is foreign as well as indigenous, and being foreign in a more extended sense than can be said of any other metropolis, it must needs be 2,363,141 in 1851. of an extent proportionate to its relations. Its energies are gigantic ; its possessions demand that they should be so. The place where the government, the cares, fears, and hopes of a hundred and sixty millions of people meet as in a focus, must needs differ from inferior capitals. The ruling head of a territory comprising nearly eight millions of square miles, a territory nearly equal to two such continents as Europe, should be vast and populous. The capital of an empire that covers an eighth of the dry land of the planet, with a population four times that of France, twice and a half that of Russia, and equal to Russia, France, Spain, Austria, and Prussia united, must be populous, must be counted by its millions. The metropolis of inferior capitals, of no mean population at home-of Dublin, Cork, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol-some with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants must excel them to take precedence. The mistress of Calcutta, with its million of souls; of Benares, Madras, Bombay, Delhi, and populous cities in India; of Quebec in America; of Sidney in Australia; of the metropolitan towns of the West India islands; of the impregnable Gibraltar and Malta-such a city must be of great superficies, populous and powerful. But London is of importance to the capitals of foreign nations that only acknowledge its moral sway. Connected with it as the great centre of the commerce of the globe, they give it due respect. There is no extended transaction in traffic but passes through the hands of British men of business at some period or another of its progress. The hearts of other capitals beat responsive to the great heart of England here. Their lifeblood blends with hers, and both circulate together. London is cosmopolitan as well as peculiar,-belonging in the first place to England, in the second to the world. The stranger need not enter the British isles to find this cosmopolitan city; for those connected with commerce are no strangers to its ubiquity. They discern it from their own capitals, of whatever nation they may be. The communications of London are borne far and wide; over sea and land her negations and affirmations are conveyed with timeless rapidity. The credit, influence, and commercial power of London are felt far "as winds fly or oceans roll." Happily, this credit, influence, and commercial power excite no hatred. If envied they are still admired as a general contribution to the common benefit of the species. This connexion of London, in its peaceful career with the stranger, is owing to itself alone. It is indebted to no extrinsic assistance, not even from its own government, except in gratitude for diminished interference with freedom of action-its thanks for standing out of its sunshine. England has increased and fructified in proportion as the ruling powers maintaining tranquillity, and repressing every warlike inclination, have substituted justice for policy and open dealing in place of diplomatic chicanery. Hence it is that London continues to prosper; that the indomitable perseverance of its citizens continues its expansive action, and rolls along a flood-tide of population as if for an interminable period-fit emblem of the national voluminousness. Outvying in wealth the Roman city, the "mother of dead empires," bringing to its doors the produce of "realms that Cæsar never knew," its merchants from their counting-houses, raise and maintain armies as numerous as those the most powerful empires can command. They |