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LONDON WEEK BY WEEK.
THE PIONEER OF SANITATION
. -SIR JOHN SIMON.
London, July 27, 1905.
''If any number of this journal" (the
Times) ever deserved to be rescued from
the usual fate of ephemeral publications and
regarded as a possession for all time it is
that of yesterday." This sentence from
an article in the leading London journal of
November 7, 1849, is interesting for two reasons.
One of these is that it relates to
a report on The Sanitary, Condition of
the City of London" by the then Chief
Health Officer of the City of London, which
was then widely acclaimed and is still recognised
as an epoch-making document in
the science of sanitation. The other point
that strikes one is that the writer of the
eulogy above quoted did not express his appreciation
of such an important publication
in the issue in which, it appeared. Not even
the least progressive of modern English,
dailies would nowadays wait 24 hours to tell
the public in-these perfervid terms of the
value of something which it had printed
"'yesterday!"
But if the appreciation was somewhat be-
lated, it was none the less deserved. Sir
John Simon (author of the report referred
to) died a couple of days ago, and this fact
led to the resuscitation of that document to
the interest and for the information of the
general public, most of whom, it is certainly
never heard of it before, but all of whom,
if they are residents of cities or towns, or
even villages, are the debtors of Sir John
Simon for the higher standard of sanitation
which prevails wherever urban, settlement
exists. It is difficult for the London inhabitant
to-day to realise what was the
sanitary condition of his city half a century,
ago and what is true of the Londoner in
this respect is equally true
of the denizens of every other
city. Without going into the details of the
condition of the less cared for parts of London
in those days, it may be interesting to
note that the principle which Sir John
Simon laid down, and which is now universally
accepted as an axiomatic truth, was
then regarded as a new and daring departure
in public health administration. This
was none other than (to quote a sentence
from this report that "the frightful phenomenon
of periodic pestilence belongs naturally
to defective sanitary arrangement."
There seems nothing remarkable to us in
this pronouncement, yet it was regarded in
those days as the Times regarded it, As
a fact, on the very ' day that Sir' John
Simon's report was made public a general
thanksgiving for the cessation of cholera
I was announced by Royal proclamation.
What he aimed at demonstrating was that
the health of each quarter of a city is dependent
on its sanitary and hygienic conditions,
and that the health of a whole city
may be lowered by the insanitary state of
one or more of its quarters. In. 1848, for
instance, some districts in London city liars
as low a. mortality from cholera as 20 per
1,000 of the population, but others were as
high as 40, and "this made the average for
the whole city about 30. To-day one never
hears of a cholera epidemic in London, and
almost solely for the reason that the science
of public health has developed along the
lines which Sir John Simon laid down.
There are now so many great public de«'
partments issuing valuable reports that
there is a danger of their being pigeon-
holed without many of them receiving the
publicity of nine columns in the Times
(which Pt. Simon's report received), or
even getting fair attention from the Minister
or the public body to whom they are
addressed. in such circumstances the. tendency
of the writers of these reports is to
make them mere records of statistical tables
and other equally important but equally dry
matters of fact. There was no such tendency
on Sir John Simon's part. He wrote
and re-wrote whole passages of his prose
with the care and verbal attention
of a poet constructing a sonnet.
The result was not stated. It was the
purest English. I have had an opportunity
of reading that report during the past day,
or two, and I cannot help thinking that one
of the reasons it commanded so much attention
was the fact that it presented the
salient facts of subjects dealt with in such
terse and- strong yet lucid language. Take
as an illustration this sentence: The inhabitants
of Open streets can hardly con
Sieve the complicated turnings, the narrow
inlets, the close parallels of houses, and
the high barriers of light and air, which
give an additional noxiousness even to their
cesspools and their filth." 1 had
something to do recently with the prepara-
tion for a London daily paper of a synopsis
of the report of the Commission of Three
on the reorganisation of the army. Now,
as a rule, the difficulty with a newspaper
man is to find even in important army or
naval reports passages which may be re-
produced in brief form without sacrificing
argument. -In the case of the document
I refer to. which was written by Sir George
Sydenham Clarke, the late Governor of
Victoria (himself an old Times hand), the
difficulty was to find space for the passages
which demanded quotation, not only

on account of importance of subjects dealt
with, but of the literary skill with which
they were constructed. That is how public
reports should be written.

¡ England arid^Commereial Education.

Speaker GofiV has been congratulating the
London _ Chamber of Commerce, on the success
of its scheme for stimulating commercial
education. This too, in the heart of
the least progressive of all English cities.
Not only is the municipal government of
the City of London (I am referring of
course to the city only, and not to greater
London) far behind that of chief provincial
cities, but the business methods of
London are inferior to those of such cities
as Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow. The
London merchant not only arrives at his
office late and leaves it early; that would
not matter so much if he made the best of
the time he devoted to business. He does
not. He acts in the spirit of half a century
ago, when, as Speaker Gully said, London
so far led the world in commercial matters
that it knew little and cared less of
what the rest of the world was doing. If
other countries will not conform to
London's way of doing business, so much
the worse for them, is what the Londoner
says and thinks. In the great northern
provincial centres there is also that supreme
belief that whatever is English is right,

but the business men there do know how
to "hustle." which is more than can be
said of the Londoner.

It has come my way recently to see- something
of Continental business methods,
and I most confess that, comparing it with
what I have seen of England and Aus
. train, the two latter have much to learn
1 from German competition. Australian

business men are smarter and more alert
than the Londoner, but they suffer from
the fact which was once true of English
traders-they have a market of their
own in which they are supreme. But the
day will come, as it has come with America,

when internal production in certain i
lines will overtake internal consumption,

and markets abroad will have to be cap-
tured if the process of industrial expansion
is to be continued. Now is the time to prepare
for the condition that will then
east. That was what Germany did
after the Franco-Prussian war, when the
necessity for th&iapture of foreign markets
was recognised. The young men who
were then sent to England and the
United States to learn the best methods of
both the old world and the new are to-day
the captains of industry in Germany,
and they in turn are sending other young
men abroad to learn to take their places.
There is not much to be gained from flying

visits on the part of heads of firms. To
begin with, they are generally too hard in
the grain to bend to new conditions, and in
the next place you can learn little of
another country's industrial ways if you are
merely a spectator. You should go there
0s a worker and go young. Your very
schools should have a commercial purpose.
I was struck the other day with the varied
knowledge of languages of some of the in-
habitants of a remote town in the Austrian
Tyrol- The explanation is that even
the children of the poor are given
at school a smattering of other tongues,
than their own. This is because the knowledge
of foreign languages has a distinct
commercial value in a country where at any
ordinary hotel one may hear German,
French, Italian-, and English (and American
spoken a the same dinner
table. Similar knowledge would not
have a similar market value in Australia,
but the same principle should apply;
the boys and girls in your schools should be
given that teaching, whether literary or
technical, which will fit them for work.
this should begin when they leave the infant
classes in the schools, and should be
continued when they enter business. That
is the time to send them to America for a
couple of years as workers. Don't send
them to England, except for special reasons,
or until their mission is not to learn how
to conduct a business (this they can learn
better in the United States nor in the Unit
ed Kingdom), but to capture markets, for
which England offers the best field in the

world.

Defective Railway, Management. Passengers

must make their own as
arrangements for crossing London." '< That
familiar announcement at the foot of time-
tables relating to railways from the north
of England to districts south of London is
a fair illustration of the conservatism that
characterises English methods of business,
even in such an up-to-date affair as railway
management. All the railways that run. to
the great midland towns, and to Scotland
have their termini on the north, side of
London, and those connected with the south
coast towns have their termini on the south

of London. A family travelling from Manchester
to Brighton would, therefore, have
to cross a gap of two miles between, the train
that brought it from Manchester and the
one by which it was going to Brighton. This
is not only an expensive operation,
but trying to the temper,
where luggage is concerned, and involving
about an hour's delay. Now,
there are railway systems which connect the
south and the north of London in-a round-
about way, certainly, yet it never seems to
have occurred to any, of the great railway
companies to link up their systems by these
lines until the other day. With a great
flourish of trumpets we are told this morning
that passengers between the London and
North-Western on the north side of London
and the London, Brighton, and South
Coast, on the south, side, may continue their
journey by train instead of omnibus or cab.
Ju what city in the world, except London,
where 100,000 non-residents enter and leave
every day by train, would such a convenience
have been so long delayed? Even now,
it is only «mfined to two companies. There
are on the south side, the London, Chatham,
and South-Eastern Company, the Great
Eastern, and the South-Eastern, and on the
north side the Great Central, the Great
Northern, the Great Western, and the Mid-
land (managed by our old Australian
friend, John Matheson), which are not yet
connected in this way by rail.

J said just now that I would not advise
you to send your young men to England
for business or industrial training. For
reasons for a somewhat analogous nature. I
would not advise you to get your railway
managers from England, still less from the
Continent, where the railway management
is, as a rule, inferior to that of either England
or the colonies. Speaking with some
knowledge (as a traveller, of course) of the
railways of every Australian State, of
Canada, of the United States, and of most
of the Continental systems, I should say
that the best railway manager for Australia
would be one who had a practical knowledge
of both the American and English systems.
A combination of the go-ahead ed
ness of the one-country with the solidity and
sureness of the other would make the Australian
railways the best in the world.

Should tire Dardanelles be Neutralised?

At the moment of writing the]

trouble connected with the seizure of the
P. & O. Company's steamship Malacca
seems to be in a fair way of settlement so
far as the release of the vessel is concerned.
If she did not carry arms or ammunition or
any other contraband of war for Japanese

use then she must be released, but this does
not affect the prior question, whether she
should have been seized at all by a steamer
which passed through the Dardanelles as a
merchantman and then suddenly became
an armed warship. Every treaty touching
the question makes it clear that no war-
ship may either enter or leave the natural
canal that connects the Black Sea with the
Archipelago. Even the Volunteer fleet
(of which the Petersburg, which seized the
Malacca, was one could, emerge from the
Mare Clausum only when flying the Russian
maritime flag and only when not carrying
arms and ammunition. Now, the Petersburg
carried both; she entered as an un-
armed Volunteer ship and emerged as an
armed cruiser. Of course, this was the
most palpable evasion of the treaty. And
equally, of course, the treaty is a foolishly
drawn one. Why should not the warships
of Russia and of every other country, too,
pass through the Dardanelles as a neutral
highway just as they pass through the Suez
Canal? The Sultan of Turkey would object,
of course, because he does not care to
run the risk of a hostile demonstration at
the very gate of his palace whenever (which
may be party day) he incurs the resentment
of one or more of the European Powers over
some phase of the Near Eastern question.

It was the central point of Sir William
White's Near Eastern policy to neutralise
the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, and to
grant the unqualified admission of warships
of all nations to the Black Sea from the
Dardanelles, and Europe will yet recognise
that this is a wise policy.

The Decay of Melodrama.

All old Londoners will be interested

learning that another celebrated home of
melodrama, the Surrey, has ceased to exist
as a theatre. It is a noteworthy fact that
there is not now in existence in London a
recognised habitation for the melodramatic
form of stage art. In turn the "Old Vic's
the Britannia, the Grecian, Sadlers' Wells,
and the Surrey have either passed away
altogether or been transformed into music
halls of the two performances a night"
order. Even the Adelphi Theatre, which
kept the n_dodr_ma_c flag flying long after
it had been hauled down at other theatres,
and which became so much the vogue that
even now one almost mechanically describes
a certain kind of play as Adelphi drama
has joined the comedy class of theatres.

Is it to our gain that musical comedy, in
which there is neither music nor comedy,
and in which farce alternate with music
hall songs in an atmosphere of patchouli,
has succeeded the somewhat lurid representations
of Human passions in which vice
was always vanquished and virtue triumphant?
You could not even half fill a London
West-End theatre now with melodrama
for one night, yet 70 years ago at the
old Surrey Jonathan Bradford, or the Murder
at the Roadside Inn" ran for months.
An old writer tells us that no fewer than
400,000 persons witnessed this representation
persons not confined to the working or
middle classes, but containing within its
numbers some thousands of the highest
order of intellect in society."

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