THE CONTRASTS OF LONDON.

Inangahua Times, Volume IX, Issue 1395, 2 May 1884, Page 2

THE CONTRASTS OF LONDON.

"Solitude is the nurse of great thought," but society is its mother; and in London, society is most complex and solitude most easy of access in any of all the aggregations of men. The seclusion of the backwoods is no more complete, so far as intellectual or social influences are concerned, than lodgings in some of the out-of-way quarters of London. The extremes meet— the publicity of the court journal and a privacy which defies the detective police ; a wealth not of individuals, as with us, but of clause?, which suspends the law of political economy a^d concomitant poverty which threatens one day to subvert them ; vortices of prosperity and misery, into which society at its extremes rushes with accelei ating and concentrating velocity ; here a quarter where in teeming tilth humanity is crowded out of existence, hour by hour, with a d-.stiiution and degradation of woe uniquely the property of London — a bottomless pit of misery, emergence from which into anything but death must be light and life ; and then a region of palaces, witiia luxury and profusion snch as England's Kings, even three hundred years ago, would have held as fabulous ; whatever there is of most pposite an extreme in life or death, in power of utter impotence, iv having or want, is here. — Century Magazine.