Lord Carnarvon, in accepting the honorary freedom and livery of
the Cutlers' Company, on Thursday week, in a ban- quet given at Freemasons' Hall, made an interesting speech on the sagacity, growth, and power of London. London, he said, had, in many great patriotic struggles always been on the winning side,—so that if, as Marshal Bliicher had said, it was the finest city in the world to plunder, it had never had to undergo that uncomfortable process, but had become instead not only the great shop, but the great counting-house of the world. In the eighteenth century, Hume, the philosopher, had conjectured that no great city would ever have a popula- tion of more than 700,000,—a speculation which he tried to demonstrate from citing the cases of London and Paris. In fact, London has now a population of 4,000,000, "a popula- tion approaching that of Scotland" [surely Lord Carnarvon should have said exceeding it], "and I venture to say, with all respect for Scotland, almost as intelligent." France is afraid to seat her Parliament in Paris. The United States are averse to seat theirs at Washington. England feels no anxiety about seating hers in London. In spite of a great professionally criminal class, a handful of police effectually keeps order, while the mighty self-acting mechanism by which the 4,000,000 of Londoners are fed, and fed surely, and without even the chance of mishap, is one of the wonders of the world, and one of those which is least wondered at. In Rome, you catch Roman fever. In Constantinople, you wake up and find that a third of the city has been burnt down while you slept. In a single twelvemonth, and but a few years ago, Paris suffered two sieges, famine, and civil war. In the great cities of America you hear of vast conspiracies of corruption, which make your hair stand on end ; but London, so much bigger than any of them, goes on her own way, not, of course, without great blunders, but still, with a certain uniformity of peace and pro- gress. Lord Carnarvon is right. London is a great marvel among cities. And her strength consists not in intensity of social feeling, like Paris, nor in splendour of historic memories, like Rome,—but rather in the sagacity which comes of sober, prac- tical energies, and of a sedate and solid, but sometimes both slow and frigid judgment.
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