The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1873-06-07 00:00:00

TOWN AND COUNTRY.

Not the least problem of the day Is that of great
of ties (says the Daily To'crept in an article on the
Whitsun holidaya). Year aftsr little homesteads are
gathered together into huge farms ; year after year our
towns grow apace; our streets are more and more
thickly crowded; our vad centres of industry eat up
the pleasant country round about, "even as an ox
licketh up the grass of the field." One wonders, in-
deed, whether there is to be any limit to the growth of
towns, any check to the depopulation of the country.
And yet the &newer is not far to seek. It liss in the
old joke whidi tells ns that Brighton is the plea-
santest suburb of all London. With our great
metropolis rebuilt—transformed into a city of wide
boulevards fringed with blossoming lime trees; with
pure water turned on in lavish abundanm from
Windermere and Coniston ; with • river clear
as the Nova Itself, flowing down seaward between im-
posing walls of granite; and last, though most import-
ant of all, will improved dwellings for the working
classes, the bees of the great overgrown hive—with all
this Lond -n will prove herself a far from unpleasant
or dreary abode, Further, as railwaTs multiply and
farm cheapen, we shall have all England for our
garden, and make as little of a run to I.lllswater, or an
hour at the Land's End, or a morning's shooting on the
Lincolnshire wastes, as we now make of an evening at
the Crystal Palace or a day at Ramsgate. " Gni
made the country," runs the old line, "and man
made the town ;" and ever since towns first began
to dot the land, the contrast between town and
country, between street and hedgerow, has grown
year by year more and more marked, until we find on
the one aide the lonely grandeur of Blair Athol, and
the quiet, lovely glades of the New Forest, and on the
other the roar and bum of Cheapside, with those
wildernesses of brick where from year's end to year's
end engines snort and furnaces glow, and machinery
clanks and rattles. And thus it comes that the mis-
chief which our busy trade has done, it undoes again.
Steam turns country into town, and steam, pitying
those whose lives it has marred, once again links
town with country. Exactly as co-operation makes
every man who has the resolution to save a
£5 note a capitalist so these very same camas to which
the growth of our great cities is due, break down
all distinction between town and country. We have
but to ask ourselves what we should be today without
the means-engine, to are at once how idle are the re-
grets ovsr the old order of things, and how entirely the
..imly remembered and vaguely regretted past is beyond
hope of recalL The burden of modern civilisation is,
after all, summed up in the rough old phrase "the more
the merrier." Cities will grow and grow; but day by
day will they become fairer, pleasanter, wholesomer,
brighter, happier. It is well for man to live with his
fellow man. Well, also, for him is it still to hold COM-
munion with nature, to know how one-sided a view of
life, with all its infinite variety, was that of the sage
who said, "Sir, I hate green fields. Sir, one green
field is very much like another. Sir, let us take a walk
down Fleet.street." Nor is there any pleasanter or
nobler sight than that of a vast city such as ours turn-
ing out into the fields for a day's holiday. Gone is
Greenwich Fair— gone withits "dram and vile squeak-
ing of the wrynecked fife, 'and in happy lieu of it a
bird's-eye glance from a balloon floating high over Lon-
don would show to-clay the country for mile upon mile
around occupied with the great city's great yearly
exodus, and doing good duty for the nonce as one vast
pleasure-ground for London's millions.