;: CA THE ACE OF ISFIGUREMENT Richardson Evans. .•i^ THE AGE OF DISFIGUREMENT THE AGE DISFIGUEEMENT RICHARDSON EVANS , :;^ REMINGTON & CO LIMITED LONDON & SYDNEY 1893 [All Ri^htf re<:eyir(f c a^ Of the two sections forming this Httle book, the first is substantially a reprint of an Article which appeared in the National Review for October, 1890, and I desire here to express my obligation to the Editors for their kind permission to reproduce it. The other section deals with the present phase of the remedial movement. I could wish that it were open to no graver reproach than that of vain repetition and lack of coherence. 1 have thought that to be frankly egotistical savoured less of presumption than the use of forms implying any right to speak for others. The views set forth are only the views of an individual member of the " National Society tor Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising." 1G9950 Digitized by tlie Internet Arcliive in 2008 witli funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation littp://www.arcliive.org/details/ageofdisfiguremeOOevanricli TABLE OF CONTENTS. I. The Age of Disfigurement (1890). . . i II. CoNciNNiTAS Redux (1893) 25 Appendix. A. Scheme of National Society for Check- ing" the Abuses of Public Advertising . 103 B. Sample Scheme of suggested Local Associations for the Protection of the Picturesque 105 C. Suggestions towards a Scheme of Muni- cipal Regulation 107 THE AGE OF DISFIGUEEMENT. (October, i8go.) Behold to what a goodly world we come ! For us the spacious bounty of the air, The impregnable pavilion of heaven, And silent muster of the disciplined stars. For us the sun replenished, and for us The punctual patience of the lonely moon ; The planetary seasons moving round Their stately soundless orbits, foste ring life In blade, leaf, flower, blossom, and reddening truit The mountains motionless, the mobile sea, Freshness of dawn and frankincense of eve, And vestal hush of meditative night. Paupers we come into a world prepared As for some regal guest ; prepared, arrayed, With temples, shrines, and statues of the gods, Cathedrals where unfaltering twilight dwells, Subduing souls to sympathy and prayer : Lakes, woods, and waterfalls, and cities girt With walls majestic circling sumptuous tombs Of sceptres superseded, thrones interred, Prodigious pageant open to us all. Alfred Austin, From " Fortunatus the Pessimist." Earth has not anything to show more fair : Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty : This city now doth like a garment wear The beauty of the morning ; silent, l)are, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky ; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill ; Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep ! The river glideth at his own sweet will : Dear God ! the very houses seem asleep ; And all that mighty heart is lying still ! Wordsworth. People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery that might be shown on behalf of their nearest neighbours. Georgk Eliot. There have been some gratifying indications of late that the March of Disfigurement is not absolutely or universally accepted as the inexorable law of progress. Those who have pleaded timidly and fitfully that something should be done to save the amenities of life from the extinction with which they are menaced, find at last, something to their surprise, that they no longer cry in the wilderness. The signs are abroad of a national awakening. Several months ago someone discovered that a huge advertising board was a repre- hensible intrusion in one of the sweetest stretches of the Thames, and wrote to tell the public so. About the same time the municipal authorities of a Welsh watering-place woke up to the strenuous conviction that bathing machines, bedaubed with the praise of a certain pushing proprietor's pills, were not an embel- lishment to the beach. Then came the Zaeo outcry, foolish enough, no doubt, but still an evidence of a lingering belief that the community should not be un- reservedly at the mercy of the bill-sticker ; and now several persons appear to have become simultaneously aware that sky-line advertising goes beyond the per- missible limit of Philistinism. This, I confess, is flattering to my presaging faculty. Chance ordained that this most hideous development of aggressive vulgarity was born, so to speak, under my very eyes. Night after night it has B been my lot to pass the factory which proudly claims to be the original home of the abomination, and on its hated roof ridge I beheld the first of the awful struc- tures rise. I shall not give particulars of place, for the obvious reason that it would please the enemy of the common peace to have his misdeeds blazoned abroad. Suffice to say that I solaced the pains occa- sioned by the spectacle with the reflection that it was the beginning of the end. If, I argued to myself, the nuisance had kept within its former bounds, society would not suffer acutely enough to make its indigna- tion felt, and daily experience would breed insen- sibility. But when street architecture disappears, when the metropolis becomes one vast expanse of aerial alphabets, when the dome of St. Paul's and the towers of Westminster are intercepted by a gigantic web of posts and rails, the dullest soul will feel that a wanton outrage is being perpetrated. I went on cynically to reflect that some day or other the crazy structure would come down with a rush, and that alarm for the physical safety of the pedestrian would effect what concern for aesthetic proprieties would not have been lively enough to essay. Zaeo was a case in point. Had the poster simply offended the eye it would have escaped criticism ; but, because in the imaginations of some people it sinned against morality, it at once suggested the question — Can nothing be done to regulate wall advertising? The sky-line modiflcation of the practice is un- doubtedly the grossest and least tolerable of all that the perverse ingenuity of the experts has devised. It has already robbed of the last trace of seemliness several of our most pretentious thoroughfares, and no one knows how long any firmamental space will be left unoccupied. I can extract no grain of comfort from the isolated acts of repentance and reparation which have followed the first outcry. To take down a sign is as much a mode of advertising as putting one up. If there be an uproar, well and good; the desired publicity has been secured, while the dis- play of unselfish deference to public feeling will be carried to account in the books of the firm as a good commercial asset. Smaller people will imitate the offence without being under any temptation to simulate the contrition. After a time, the novelty of undoing the evil done will wear off, and those who believe that these sky announcements attract custom will not care to substitute a speculative investment in the gratitude of the crowd. The whole practice of advertisement rests on the assumption that the only way to interest the passer in the wares of the trader is to worry him unrelentingly and incessantly. The experts in the art are far too shrewd not to understand that a generation which has been subjected to such a discipline has lost all delicacy of moral perception. Slaves are not expected to show the virtues of free men ; and a public in whom long experience of tor- ment has developed a blessed callousness can no longer discriminate between clemency and cruelty in those who play upon its nerves. After all, this particular phase of the disfigurement question is important mainly because it has arrested attention and broken the long spell of despairing sub- mission. If every aerial symbol were removed to- morrow — ^if the argument of physical insecurity prevailed, and the fear of having to pay damages for the havoc wrought to person and property by the descent of the structures into the thoroughfares pre- vailed over the hope of catching custom — there would hardly be any appreciable relief to the " quiet eye." Some time ago — it seems a period now very far away — there was nothing more picturesque, nothing more majestic, than the view from Waterloo Bridge towards Blackfriars. The charm has ceased, the glory has departed. But let us be just. The sky-line frameworks only threaten to complete the ruin which other disfigurements began. There was a gloomy and romantic Shot Tower on the south side of the river, which was one of the dominating features in the scene. In an evil hour it occurred to the proprietors that it offered, in its imposing isolation, a splendid advertising station. Accordingly they painted on two of the faces large bands of white groundwork, and on this they inscribed their name and the trade they prosecuted. It maybe read a mile away, with effects on the merely sensitive beholder that maybe guessed. Incongruity is the worst form of ugliness, and a glaring patch of this sort converts all that was pleas- ing into an offence. In vain does the eye seek to dwell on the flotilla of moored barges which lie sleepily in the stream ; in vain does it struggle to rest on the graceful bulk of St. Paul's. True, it has not yet occurred to the owners of the craft to make the sides eloquent (in vermilion and emerald green) of the superlative merits of So-and-So's dogs' meat, or to inscribe as a legend on the sail the saving virtues of the Patent Emetic. Not yet have the sky-line frames shrouded with their abhorrent lattice-work the mighty dome. These things we are spared for the moment. But the perpetual presence of the deformed and deforming tower spoils the dream."^ It is here to" remind us in our most contemplative mood that every delight that nature or art can offer, every glory that the past has bequeathed to the present, the grandest of our monuments, the finest of the effects which clouds and light reveal, and the happy combinations which the natural play of human activities produce, are ours indeed, but are held upon the most precarious of tenures. The caprice, the stupidity, the insensi- bility, nay, the deliberate malice of one person may * Since this was written, the gentle obliterating toucli of London smoke has softened the inscription to inoff'ensiveness. destroy what it took the exertions and the lavish outlay of generations to create, and may kill in an hour charms which were part of the delight of many lives. It may be that of the thousands of human beings who every hour stream across the bridges, those who have eyes to perceive and souls to feel are hardly to be reckoned by the score. I have even known persons who pretend to culture maintain seriously that the Surrey side is one long panorama of unmitigated and irredeemable ugliness. The multi- tude are subdued to the element in which fate has ordained that they shall live and move and have their being. But are the few who see something in human affairs nobler and better than the pursuit of gain, and who, if they cheerfully accept the law of universal labour, claim for themselves the right to enjoy, as well as to struggle, to win refreshment for the spirit as well as nourishment for the body ; are these, I say, unworthy of the regard of the practical philanthropist ? Is the lowest and coarsest standard to be taken as the determining one? Here I am concerned only to maintain that the lives of a vast number of men and women, who certainly are not among the least worthy members of society, are made distinctly poorer by each blot upon the Thames' bank. What is true of Southwark is true of an infinite number of other regions, where some wan- tonly jarring and intrusive feature spoils a scene which would be, if not gracious, at least not distressing. I am not blaming the owners. They were not bound, I suppose, to think of the public when they had a chance of improving their business. " If we had not made the most of our advantage," I can conceive their arguing, " other firms would have made the most of theirs. Blame not us, but the insensate rivalry of modern trade, and the apathy of public feeling which allows us, in our suicidal struggles, to neutralize all 6 that has been done to minister to the better tastes of men, and to efface from the only landscape on which the toiling masses can look all elements of grace and restfulness." I might multiply instances indefinitely. But the shot tower will suffice to show how a minimum exercise of power by individuals, an exercise of power absolutely legitimate in itself, has worked the maxi- mum amount of damage to the public interest, so far as it is a public interest to conserve what is beautiful and to exclude what is repulsive in public prospects. I need not rehearse the melancholy list of advertising disfigurements and others of a kindred type. Every- one is apparently free to inflict any discomfort or even pain upon the community, if by doing so he can secure notoriety for something in which he feels an interest. Of all the sorry bits of cant that I know, there is none to compare with the talk about the "taste" shown in the new developments. Each bill or tablet is, I readily allow, neat enough, and often is admirable in design or colouring. But street advertisements in the aggre- gate are beyond all question a nuisance, and, what is material to my point, they are efficacious very often in proportion to the annoyance they cause. The per- sons interested rely on the recurrence of nervous shocks. If a man has physic to sell, and attempts to impress me with a sense of its merits by knocking me down every five minutes, 1 have my remedy in the police courts. If, again, he depend on lung power to puff his wares, and hire a small boy to shout into my ear every two minutes the name and title of the article in question, this also would be a matter for the Justices. But if he commits assault and battery on my eyes, if he so arrange his execrable enamelled announcements in blue and yellow, that, turn w^here I will, I am con- fronted with one at every step, I must suffer. The law gives me no relief ; the institutions under which I live give me no protection. 1 go in fear of my spirit's life at railway stations. I dare not look out of the window as the train carries me through the " residential suburbs." If I mount the steps of an omnibus, lo ! the enemy grins horribly in my face with staring brutality of vivid colour; and if I take the penny steamer, he is there. Chelsea, Lambeth, London Bridge : these are obsolete distinctions ; all the metropolitan, and, for the matter of that, the pro- vincial world, is one under the levelling rule of the almighty placard. I have no intention of spoiling my case by con- founding in one sweeping complaint all sorts of painted or printed notifications. Nor do I for a moment assume. that any considerable proportion of my fellows-citizens are so uncomfortably constituted as I am in relation to these matters. I believe an appre- ciable number of excellent people would rather have the existing display in omnibuses, on the steps of ex- hibitions, on the fronts of buildings in public thorough- fares, in railway stations, wherever, in fine, money can purchase a few feet of superfices, than have the garish display banished altogether. Taste, I quite realize, is subjective, and the addition that jars on one pair of eyes may commend itself to another pair, on the ground that it " brightens things up a bit." Let me at the earliest moment make my peace with that most formidable and intolerant order of intelli- gence which prides itself on being above all things " practical." I am very sensible that We live in a world where commonplace is lord and master ; I know that it is hopeless to ask public authority to interpose to save the finer — or, to avoid coloured language, let us say the exceptional — feelings of the few. Jf I could persuade myself that the people deliberately prefer to have what the aforesaid few call comeliness banished from the face of England, I should hold my peace and endure. But I am persuaded that there is no positive preference for disfigurement — nay, that the majority of men, though they may not be uncomfortably con- scious of the malady, would appreciate the relief. In this as in many other departments of life, the good-humoured or despairing resignation of the public is falsely construed as active connivance or consent. The balance of opinion, and, beyond all question, the tendency of collective effort, is towards taste, not towards the negation of taste. The very fact that many whose business it is to prepare advertisements strive to make them individually neat and attractive, that it has been found commercially remunerative to hire accomplished painters or draughtsmen to prepare designs, implies that there is a critical faculty in the breast of those to whom the signs are to appeal. Take, again, our public buildings. Our constitution is democratic, and the first duty of a representative is held to be to cut down wasteful outlay. Yet what Ministry would dare to submit proposals for some new official pile which did not involve lavish expen- diture for the sake of architectural effect ? That the nation does not always get what the Aediles are sup- posed to aim at does not affect the argument. What praise the Metropolitan Board of Works earned and obtained by the construction of the Thames Embank- ment ! Yet, if a way for vehicles were alone desired, where was the advantage in devising all that fineness of proportion, that massive grace of chiselled granite ? Pass, again, to natural beauty. How it redounds to the honour of the City Corporation that they saved Epping Forest and Burnham Beeches ! Why Burn- ham Beeches? If the problem were simply to provide a picnic-ground, it would have been a simple matter to get a larger area of less stately woodland ever so much nearer town. If this bogey of popular indiffer- ence were not perpetually being set up to discourage the reformer, it might seem waste of time to quote instances to prove that the masses, or those who speak for them, do prefer the congruous to the incon- 9 gruous, grace to hideousness, repose to endless jar. Go to an East-end theatre : observe with what raptures the gallery greets the transformation scene. Where would be the applause if the palm-trees bore trade inscriptions, or the fairy sprites were utilized as sand- wich-men ? Would Battersea Park retain its fascina- tion if the Sub-tropical Gardens were placed at the disposal of one of the too well-known firms? All I claim of the " practical intelligence" is to be consistent. If the community devotes so much of its resources to providing objects intended to please the eye, it surely is illogical to concede a discretionary power to individuals to destroy the effect when the expenditure has been incurred. If a garden is created at infinite expense on the Thames Embankment, is it not monstrous that a railway company should be allowed to annihilate the picturesque effect by dis- playing high above the leafy vista a permanent blaze of excursion announcements, which, even if they fulfil the intention of the enterprising managers, will result only in an infinitesimal increase to the dividends. Here, let me remark, as an illustration of the work- ings of the '' practical spirit," that probably many of the directors who have authorized this unfeeling Van- dalism will be found munificent patrons of societies for bringing beauty home to the poor, and possibly write letters at intervals to the papers to urge that really and truly " something ought to be done to make London beautiful." Their notion is that another quarter of a million or so should be spent upon rear- ing a pretentious edifice or cutting a new thorough- fare ; but that the right of anybody and everybody to introduce an element of torture into the costly pano- rama shall, as heretofore, be tacitly reserved. Again, I plead, let us be consistent. If it is a fundamental and immutable principle of the British Constitution that no one who owns, or rents, or hires a piece of ground is to be under any obligation, in his use of it, 10 to respect the susceptibility of his fellows — that Sight alone of all the senses maybe outraged with impunity, let us accept the consequences. Let us, that is to say, cease to squander funds in developing tastes which can only be a cause of lifelong suffering to those who possess them. Instead of teaching the children at Board Schools to feel the delicate harmonies of tint and form, let us instil into them a saving insensibility to ugliness. Let us fortify them, as the phrase goes, for the battle of life by deadening the faculties in which they will be vulnerable to the countless shafts of all subduing Philistinism. Let us (cant again !) adapt them to their environments. There is no form of pain more wearying than that which attacks us in the sphere of our highest pleasures. It is only the trained musician that knows the agony of a false note. It may be said that the existing reign of anarchy is a working compromise between the rival powers. The Englishman's house, according to this theory, is his castle. From the ramparts he can hurl his mis- siles at will against the passers-by ; within it he is free to indulge, unassailed, any cravings in the way of taste with which he may be afflicted. The arrange- ment is scarcely flattering to civilization. But let that pfts-s. The exemption it provides is too partial to deserve recognition. To the rich man it gives only an occasional respite ; for the poor man it does noth- ing. The families who " live in one room," the artisans who, after food is found for wife and little ones, have no available balance to spend on etchings and easy chairs, are left outside the understanding. No. The "practical intelligence" must really provide some more substantial excuse than this for the policy of folded hands, with or without groans. Those who have had the patience to follow me thus far will bear with me, I trust, yet a little longer while I try to roll out of the way other boulders with which the Faint-hearts or the Gallios would block the line of 11 action. It is, we are eternally told, a utilitarian age. England is very full, and very busy. Everyone is intent on money-making, and will not stand any finicking nonsense about unsightliness and what not in the race for profit. People who have to earn a livelihood cannot afford to indulge in aesthetic tom- foolery. You cannot have mediaeval quaintness and prettiness — if, indeed, the Middle Ages cared an atom more than the nineteenth century for grace and come- liness — in the thick of an industrial community. The individual speculator will not forego, and ought not to be asked to forego, a chance of making gain. Look at the fortunes made by the free employment of posters. Will you strike at the root of prosperity in a nation of shopkeepers just for the sake of sparing your nerves ? No, says the practical man, cultivate a little necessary toughness of fibre. " He who wears shoes," runs the Sanscrit proverb, "carpets the earth with leather." " He who ceases to be fastidious," as the Hitopadcsha, edited for the use of true-born Britons, would put it, " will find life endurable for himself, and will cease to distress others with his querulous preaching." I am far from disputing that the advice would be judicious if the premisses were sound. It is as a con- vinced utilitarian that I write, and above all as one who accepts the iron law of economic production. Each age has to face its own conditions and make the best of them. I claim to be infinitely more in har- mony with my time and to breathe more truly the spirit of the age than the degenerate and ungrateful children who ask us to believe that the generation is hopelessly, irredeemably, content with sordid sur- roundings. What is utilitarianism ? The doctrine that our regulations, political and social, should be framed with a view to the widest possible diffusion of happiness. And happiness — what is it ? I forbear definition. I would not limit the scope. No doubt 12 the fulfilment of duty is in itself happiness, and in this sense I can conceive that there is joy and reward for those who, according to their lights, fight on bravely through an existence that knows no calm con- templation of nature, no comfort in the survey of the works of man. A home may be excruciating to the eye of taste, and yet the shrine of many a virtue. But I protest against the tendency of some minds to assume that because taste and morals belong to different spheres, there should be an eternal divorce between them. The sightless man is not, ipso facto, better than the man who sees. What is duty? What is the goal at which it aims ? The happiness of others. And who will exclude from the elements of happiness the enjoyment of physical loveliness, or at least exemption from never-ceasing collision with physical deformity. This is where the apologists for unfettered license in the disfigurement of public places land themselves in a contradiction. Authority must not control, they say, because that would interfere with trade, and trade brings profit. Society, in other words, must be made unhappy at every turn in order that society may have the means of happiness. The higher and broader utility must be sacrificed lest the trivial and subordi- nate utilities should be compromised. The proprietor of a quack medicine is to be free to afflict remorse- lessly and indiscriminately the gaze of millions, not one in a thousand of whom could by any possibility become his customers. And the recompense (from the Philistine point of view, the justification) of his persistence is that by doing so he amasses wealth enough to get a " little place in the country " to which he personally can retreat and find refuge from the inferno that he and his kind have created. I am dealing just now with the " business " defence of the existing license. Is this, I ask, a business-like pro- ceeding? Is it utilitarianism ? Is it the shortest and 13 cheapest way to secure the greatest happiness of the greatest number ? Surely it is simpler to leave the earth habitable for the children of men. This brings me to the essence of the controversy. It appears to be a very hard saying to most people that it is not steam, nor manufactures, nor the growth of population that makes towns unlovely ; but it is true. Florence, and Venice, and Genoa, Ghent and Antwerp, or to come back to our own shores, Nor- wich or Totnes, or unregarded Rye in Sussex are reputed to be fairly picturesque. Yet every grace they possess was given to them in the days when they were the centre of fierce bustle and turmoil. Whatever jars is the work of these times of progress and enlightenment. If it be objected that the glories of the Italian and Flemish towns, and of our English Norfolk, were due to a combination of opulence and munificence among the burghers of long ago, I own it ; but I add, that public spirit, infinitely greater in these times, cannot redeem the character of our cities and rural districts until the hand of the defacer be stayed. To what purpose has been all our outlay on the Thames Embankment while it is in the power of the tenant of any one of the buildings on the bank to make his facade one huge advertising scroll in gam- boge and pink ? or so long as nothing but the absence of external motive prevents the directors of any of the railway companies that possess bridges from plastering the girders from end to end with vivid descriptions of cheap trips, and more or less imaginative time-tables. If we want to beautify the metropolis — and some- one is always producing a big and costly scheme for achieving this noble end — the one simple and effectual method is not to add anything, but to prevent certain things from being added. Do not invite your architects to rear yet another structure to be killed by the neighbouring vulgarities ; but give such art as the architects have already used a chance. Pull down 14 the sordid hatchments, and reveal to the passers-by details of delicate stone-work and admirable terra cotta which have lain perdu behind the planking ever since the builder made the edifice over to the trades- man and his expert advisers. Great will be the excitement when the public discovers, to its astonish- ment, some fine morning that modern British archi- tecture may be found outside the precincts of the design-room at the Royal Academy Exhibition. Our public departments will have to surrender one or two traditions if they are to co-operate in the regenerat- ing movement. The appointed Guardians of parks and commons and woodland spaces must disabuse themselves of the notion that the official fitness of things demands the wholesale erection of useless notice-boards at every point of picturesque vantage, while the District Councils (which it is not precipitate to suppose will exist in the golden age I am prefigur- ing) may be induced to indicate the names of streets by labels less fatal to the architecture of the corners than the aggravating things in glistening blue and white, which the fancy of the Municipal Surveyor has devised. There is, I repeat, no reason under the sun whv the places where human beings work or dwell should be repulsive. The cottages, the inns, the homesteads that delight the eye of the traveller in rural districts were not constructed with any deliberate regard to picturesque effect. It is hardly less easy to make a workman's suburb agreeable than to make it — as the practice of the speculative builder ordains — an area, at the best, of depressing uniformity. It is not out- lay that has made the precincts of the Temple a haven of blissful rest. Nor is it — be it said with all respect — the ornate and pretentious piles erected to the ■order of the Benchers of to-day that bestow or sus- tain the charm. The old courts, with their grim, smoke-encrusted tenements of plain brick, soothe the 15 sense simply because no jarring addition has been allowed, and because the piety ot departed Treasurers placed here and there a sapling, which the nurturing care of time has converted into stately trees. The secret is an open one. All that is w^anted is that degree of care and con- science, the absence of which everyone is ready to denounce when it leads to sanitary evil. The judi- cious and timely planting of a few young trees may convert what would otherwise have been an eye- sore into a delight. A Virginian creeper, a fig, a vine, a jasmine ; what a perpetual miracle does the man who spends sixpence and five minutes on any one of these create for the comfort of posterity. Compare the street of sombre brick in Bloomsbury that is varied and brightened by these kindly climbers with the staring painted barrenness of a fashionable thoroughfare in Belgravia. If I had to point out the one standing impediment to grace, I should unhesitat- ingly name the paint-pot. Whitewash or any form of pigment can hardly ever offend. I was going to say something in praise of drapery, but I recall the awful possibilities of calico blinds. When I say that manufactures do not involve ugli- ness, I make no exception as regard the factories. There is, or there would be if the perversity of the individual proprietors allowed, a grim dignity about these vast agglomerations of busy workshops and ware- rooms, with their gigantic gables and stately chimneys belching Tartarean smoke, which appeals both to the imagination and to the thoughtful eye. Of railways is it necessary to speak? Turner saw the poetic aspect of the locomotive ; and I am content to leave the revelation to his brush. It is not the iron roads, the graceful sweep of the embankments, the mystic signals, the romantic cuttings that repel, but the wanton eye-sores. I never see a little station garden, its pretty' clumps backed by a panorama of Removals 16 by Sea or Land, ^^ithout feeling that here is a typical illustration of the contest between Ormuzd and Ahri- man. If the employes would only strike against the outrage on the flower-beds, they might count on generous subscriptions to the Union fund. One of the curious side-effects of the recent controversy is the development of genteel notions about the beautiful and the repulsive. One person (who had contributed a horror to the river below bridge) disposed of his critics to his own satisfaction by asking what there was to spoil. For this gentleman — a type no doubt of many who for all that are held in high esteem by their bankers — it was a perfectly grotesque idea that there was any picturesqueness about the Pool. Artists and other eccentrics might have delusions, but the commercial instinct sees nothing that need be spared. It is dirty mud at low tide — dirty water at high. Chimneys, masts, and other dirty things keep sticking up into the dirty atmosphere. There is nothing at all pretty and bright, except, indeed, at Rosherville Gardens, and, perhaps, some of the pavilions on the piers when the paint is quite fresh. The makers of the signs take much the same view. The chimney- stacks, with their clusters of uncanny pots and cowls, the telegraph-poles and ventilating-tubes are already there, and are not joys to the beholders; what for- bids, then, to make what is already unpleasant abso- lutely unbearable. Because certain things have been permitted, anything must be borne. Because we have not saved what we might have saved, we are to sacrifice all the rest. Another argument that finds much favour with those who think that nothing can be done is based on a principle which was once held in just respect. The liberty of the individual to do what he likes with his own; the danger and difficulty of interfering with the rights of private property : I am as jealous in these things as Lord Bramwell himself. But be it observed 17 that civilized society rests on restrictions. Legitimate liberty begins where legitimate restraint ends, and not before. To use your own in such a way as not to injure your neighbour's, is a fundamental maxim of law and morality. A man is not allowed to build a house, even on his own ground, precisely as he pleases. Municipal bye-laws prescribe imperative conditions about frontage and about drainage, to which the free- holder must submit. He cannot preach from his draw- ing-room window doctrines which ordinary morality condemns. The Italian may not grind his organ in the street when the aggrieved householder motions him round the corner. Instances might be multiplied indefinitely. If the collective will overrides individual caprice in matters affecting the ear, the smell, the health, the moral sense, why should the eye alone be left outside the pale of legal protection. "Oh!" comes the answer oat, " because it is so hard to draw the line ; because tastes differ ; because what capti- vates one agonizes another." Most true ; but this absence of universally accepted standards is not peculiar to the sphere of vision. Notions of decency (as every traveller knows) differ from one country to another. What shocks an English woman would not be thought coarse by a French woman. What would argue depravity in Great Britain is prescribed by usage in Japan. Yet are we to blot all the laws for upholding public morals from the statute book ? Sani- tary engineers have as yet arrived at no common understanding as to modes of house-drainage, disposal of sewage, and so on. Are we on that account to say there shall be no code of building rules, and that con- servancy arrangements shall lapse? Homoeopaths denounce allopaths, allopaths denounce homoeopaths, the public possibly are not absolute believers in the science of either ; are we for this reason to disestablish the College of Physicians ? What shall we say of art ? Has any building ever pleased all the architects ? C 18 Has any picture ever received the suffrages of all the painters ? Yet the Royal Academy is not to be deprived, just yet, of its endowments. I cannot trust myself to speak of the feuds of the savants, and can only, therefore, remark in passing that science, in spite of the difference among the doctors, is still taught at public expense in universities and elemen- tary schools. Perhaps cruelty to animals and children offers the best analogy. Men of equally kind disposi- tion have irreconcilable notions about the limits of judicious discipline. A farmer thinks nothing of practices which make the flesh of the sentimentalist creep. Yet who proposes that the law shall not pro- vide penalties for brutality ? If a strong and urgent reason exists for authoritative intervention between the public and the defacers of public places, there is, 1 maintain, no antecedent objection to interference. And is there not a cause ? At present no place is safe. The quaint cottage by the roadside is plastered with enamelled puffs. The sequestered nook enshrines the painted panels of competing hotels. The piers on remote Highland lochs are emulating the garish medley of the Under- ground Railway. It may be possible — indeed, I know, by happy experience, that it is still possible — to escape from the pest ; but one has ceased to have any confi- dence. The sense of insecurity, jurists tell us, is the worst incident of despotic government. During an earthquake period, it is not so much the shock that appals as the continuous apprehension that unmans. A special disease of the nervous system is, I am told, developed at such times. To some such malady of the soul, thousands of men who cannot wrap them- selves, as the fortunate many do, in the mantle of in- sensibility, are daily victims. Vede e passa. They cannot, alas ! pass without seeing; they fear, when as yet they have not perceived ; they cannot even, like the Eton truants, snatch a fearful joy from momentary 19 exemption. These have the highest interest in obtain- ing some sort of guarantee against the indefinite extension of the scourge ; but reform is the concern of the multitude as well. There is, I believe, a general readiness to accept the doctrine that there are places (" prospects," perhaps, would convey the meaning better) where no obtrusive advertising ought to be permitted, and that even in unprotected areas adver- tising should be regulated. In every breast lingers some sense of comeliness, of congruity, some prefer- ence for what is picturesque to what is sordid and un- lovely. Many who do not quite realize that it is wanton and unnecessary advertising that makes the aspect of English towns— yes, and of English villages and rural resorts — every day less pleasing, would, nevertheless, feel the transformation when it was wrought. For the minority, half the sting will be taken from the pain when sufferers can feel that there is a limit set to the scourge. Let me now, with more diffidence than I have been able to affect in speaking of the disease, indicate roughly and tentatively the lines on which relief may be sought. One word of caution on the threshold. If we are to succeed at all, we must not attempt too much. We cannot trust to public feeling to redress our wrong, but we shall have to carrv public feeling with us. We shall only make ourselves bores and laughing-stocks if we give ourselves superior airs, and rail at the " tastelessness " of a generation which is not disposed to fret itself to death because things exist that we find disagreeable. We must, in a word, be opportunists. We must tolerate much that we dislike, and welcome some things that we should not wish for. For instance, I am individually persuaded that if it were penal to exhibit any notification of any kind, or for any purpose, in letters more than an inch in height; if it were treason by statute to erect any building, or to make any alteration in a building, not 20 fairly in harmony with the surroundings ; and, above all, if architects were held criminally responsible for providing, as an integral part of the design, chimneys that would carry off the smoke and the proper appara- tus for efficient house drainage ; if, that is to say, these accomplished persons were forbidden to dele- gate the most important part of their functions to the chimney doctor and the journeyman plumber, no harm would be done to anyone, and an enormous addition would be made to the sum of human happiness. But the proposal is too practical to be practicable. We must not speak of it; we must not think of it. Putting aside the impossible, suggestions may be arranged in a descending scale. First would come the conferment on local representative bodies of a power of regulation, either absolute or subject to appeal. This would only be the application to a case peculiarly suited for it of the principle of local option, which, as regards the liquor traffic, has been repeatedly affirmed. I do not think there is any risk that the authority thus given to popular bodies would be abused. The tendency would rather be to laxity. But it would provide an efficacious remedy in those cases which are constantly occurring, where something in which a locality takes a pride and delight, or — more important still — something which brings custom to a place, is jeopardized by the greed or stupidity of an individuaL The prosperity of many villages, for instance, depends on their reputation for picturesqueness. The provi- sion suggested would prevent a single tradesman from destroying the harmony of the whole. It would, in short, empower a representative authority to do what many large landlords earn the gratitude of the locality by doing now. through a simple exercise of their territorial rights. Secondly, it should be possible to schedule scenes of remarkable beauty or interest, and to protect them from desecration by a general Act. This has beea 21 done as regards ancient monuments. Why should Sir John Lubbock limit his sympathies to prehistoric remains? Thirdly, it has often been urged, on purely revenue grounds, that a tax should be imposed on advertising posters in England as in most Continental countries. It would be a welcome addition to local resources, and could not be vehemently resisted even by those who flatter themselves that they have vested interests in the art of display. It would not seriously reduce the number of habitual offenders, but would rid us of a vast quantity of desultory, half-hearted bills and posters. Fourthly, even if opinion be not found ripe for any of these courses, much may be achieved by the action of individuals. If every tourist who finds a pretty place spoiled would only tell the innkeeper so, an appreciable benefit would result. The want of per- ception on the part of natives in these matters is well understood, but is seldom allowed for. As often as not the local man imagines that the eye-sore is one of the attractions. No one would take me seriously if I did not insist on the necessity for forming an Association. I do. But 1 fear that I shall disappoint reasonable expecta- tions by assigning to it singularly modest functions. The members will, of course, " lose no opportunity of contributing to the creation of a healthy public senti- ment on this vital subject." Apathy and despairing resignation rather than deliberate hostility are the difficulties to be overcome. The hotel smoking-room, the top of the coach, the deck of the steamer, offer hopeful fields for the new mission.'^ But, I confess, the weapon from the vigorous use of which I should expect the best results lies ready to be grasped and wielded by every householder. The nuisance culminates in the effort to secure notoriety * It will be seen in the second part of this bocik, that the idea of a National Society has since been worked out in detail. 22 for certain varieties of commodities that are in general consumption. Those who are aggrieved have the remedy in their own hands. They have only to cease to use any article which is offensively advertised. By this blameless exercise of the right of discrimination they will not only discourage iniquity, but will save money; for, of course, the cost of wholesale puffing is included in the price, and there is hardly a case in which, by proper inquiry, a substitute of equal, perhaps identical quality, may not be procured at a reduction of 25 per cent. As the persons likely to act on this advice constitute the class to which, as a rule, the staring insincerities of the posters are ad- dressed, the enterprising managers would very soon find that their unscrupulous zeal did not pay. Their con- science would at last be touched in its sensitive point. No one probably dreams of suppressing the display of notices on hoardings of a temporary kind. When a site is vacant, and building operations are going on, there is in any case a break of continuity which must be filled, and it may as well be filled with paper- hanging as with bare boards. Assuming that there must be advertisements, that is the place for them. The aim of the judicious reformer must be to concen- trate and keep within manageable bounds phenomena which we cannot get rid of. Nor, if anyone suggests that something positive may be said in praise of such an ordered and compact display of colour and device, will 1 care very energetically to dissent. Nay, I will not rule out as inadmissible the contention that there might be recognized stations of a permanent kind at which those who liked such things might revel in them, and which those whose tastes run otherwise would be free to shun. I only plead for liberty of choice. Should anyone say that to impose any check or prescribe any condition is to hamper trade, I must answer that a statement more absolutely at variance with fact could not be made. That an individual who 23 has based his business on the method of factitious publicity may be thwarted, I allow. But trade, legiti- mate trade, respectable trade, honest trade, would reap enormous benefit. The morbid physiology of advertising is worth remark. It is practised only in certain depart- ments, and in them one can generally recall the beginning of the system. Mustard, soap, tea, furni- ture, wine, beer, patent specifics, these almost exhaust the list. The public does fairly well in the matter of meat and vegetables, and bread and butter, and all the main staples of household economy, without having the names of particular brands thrust upon the eye at every turn. Stairs were kept scrupulously clean long before a thousand and one competing soaps jostled for vicious prominence on the omnibus steps. It requires a very modest faculty of divination to conjecture that of the firms who have thus to assail the public sense few are willing offenders. One pushing tradesman begins, and the rest, to the ruin, not to the advantage, of the industry are forced in self-defence to follow. I believe that a veto on advertising— not that I am contending for it — would be an immense relief to many who have to spend a large part of their capital not on raw material or plant, or in kindly dealing with workpeople, but in barefaced puffery. Supposing a dozen people are in a small room. Two begin to talk to each other at the top of their voices. The others must either give up conversation or shout also. The result is that no one hears so well as before, and that comfort is at an end. So it is with trade; a number of old-fashioned firms sell an honest article at an honest price. One of them in an evil hour comes under the control of a ''pushing manager." Henceforth all have to supplement their really pro- ductive stalT with an army of bill-stickers and painters 24 and enamellers. The public have to pay for the outlay necessary to give them pain. I wish most strongly to emphasize this considera- tion. Not only should we have whatever is sound in the world of commerce and industry with us, but we should have the press enthusiastrcally on our side. Our public writers would, — need I say? — be in any case the champions of all that made for grace and sim- plicity in our daily life. But the disinterested zeal of the critics would be reinforced by the less altruistic instincts of the conductors. Reduce the number of notices on the walls, on the posts, on the housetops, and the inevitable result will be an increase of those appearing in the columns of the daily papers. Thrown broadcast they afflict all alike ; in the journals they appeal only to those who look for them. In the one case they are a scourge, against which the highest philosophy has no defence ; in the other they represent a providential arrangement, by which those who are beguiled by professions contribute indirectly to the support of an institution for the propagation of right ideas. CONCINNITAS REDUX. (March, 18^3.) More than two years have passed since I first took up my parable concerning the March of Disfigure- ment. In the interval much has occurred to justify my forecasts and something to fulfil my hopes. The sky signs which provoked me into speech multiplied rapidly beyond endurance point, and though in many places the ghastly fabrics remain as monuments of the evils to which the absence of reasonable regulation exposes society, a term has been set to the existence of all. The London County Council, to whose parliamentary action we owe our assured prospect of deliverance, flinched, as my doubting spirit presaged, from standing forth confessedly as the guardians of public comeliness. But though danger to the life and limb of passers-by was the pretext, anxiety to prevent the culminating outrage on the sense of sight was, no doubt, the impelling motive. Virtue grows by prac- tice, and as a sequel to this act of disguised reverence for the proprieties, an edict has gone forth, without any cloak of solicitude for physical safety, reducing advertising hoardings to comparatively moderate ele- vations. The next stage, let us hope, will be a frank recognition that it is distinctly a public interest to maintain decency of aspect in our thoroughfares and places of general resort. A reasonable standard of taste, in fact, will take rank with consideration of health and of facilities for locomotion as determining principles in the ordering of affairs in town and country. It has further appeared that the City of London 28 does already exercise, albeit, in no very fastidious spirit, control over wall advertising, and that the Chief Commissioner of Police has discretion as to the trade embellishments of vehicles. There have been some remarkable rulings on the subject. A brougham decorated with floral puffery has been held intolerable, chiefly, it would seem, because the liveries worn by the gentlemen on the box were too grand to be con- sistent with the austerities of the perfumery trade. Then there were the processional omnibuses, but as this case is still sub lite, the discreet Muse must be silent. Further symptoms of advance are found in the circumstance that, when an ingenious inventor announced the discovery of a method of flashing signals on the clouds, several morning papers arrived, independently, at the conclusion that the sky was hardly an appropriate place for advertisements. Even the comparatively mild suggestion that the vestries should (following the example of the omnibus com- panies) let out the glass in the street lamps for mercantile illuminations, was not favourably received. It would hardly be scientific to register the opposi- tion to the St. John's Wood railway scheme or to the extension of tramways to the Thames Embankment as tokens of improved feeling; since the very persons who were exercised about the amenities of the polite suburb or the riverside boulevard would probably lift neither hand nor voice to purge from stations and public vehicles the features that, mainly, make them objectionable. It may at first appear a hard saying, but any reader who cares to make an effort of practical imagination can verify its truth, that if the most hideous terminus, for which the metropolis can blush were used only for purposes immediately essential to the working of the traffic and the convenience of travellers, there would be little to offend and much in tlie general spectacle to entertain. A market is not '' ugly," nor 29 a dockyard. There is a certain impressiveness about massive girders and light arches, about eager crowds and the equable remorseless force of the huge loco- motives. Nothing, 1 maintain, need be displeasing to the eye that frankly subserves the real wants of everyday humanity. It is the accidents, the mercenary makeshifts, the incongruous accretions, that convert simplicity into an offence. There was sadness enough and to spare about the great omnibus strike; but it revealed to many eyes what, till then, had been either denied or not perceived, the beauty and picturesque- ness of some of our great thoroughfares. It was not the ampler space or freer vistas that wrought the marvellous change ; but the disappearance of the blazing irrelevancies of the road cars. There may be a lack of positive charm in many of our city avenues. But the absolute grossness is due to wanton blemish. In the city proper are many long lines of facades not unworthy of Verona or of Venice in the days when the Italians had not ceased to reconcile the most prosperous commerce with perfect stateliness and exquisite grace. 1 permit myself to reaffirm this doctrine of the essential harmlessness and potential grace of common things, because an earlier perception of its truth w^ould have averted the calamity of Trade Disfigurement. There are, as we have seen, encouraging tokens that municipal authorities are ceasing to be indifferent to the evil, and claim the right of setting some limit to its growth. Yet this tardy evidence that the matter is regarded as one of public concern is only a testimony to the rapid advance of the evil. The host is roused from slumber because the enemy is swarm- ing in the camp. The mischief that timely vigilance would have kept within manageable dimensions is now so vast that many are found to despair of bringing it under control. There was a time — not so long ago — when the open country was fairly free from the 30 pest; when, in towns, the display was confined to comparatively unobtrusive posters on hoardings and dead walls ; and when, if the interior of railway stations was not exactly modest, the fabric inside and out was not absolutely placed at the disposal of the advertising contractor. But now humanity has become almost accustomed to the ubiquitous enamelled plate ; one marvels at the moderation of the shopkeeper who does not cover his fa9ade with gaudy things in print or paint ; and if I may believe the evidence of my own eyes and the testimony of many agonized cor- respondents, it is difficult to find any considerable stretch of railway line along which a continuous series of boards, lifting their repulsive height towards the heavens, does not convert into torture the fair prospect of field and wood and sea. It is not merely the extent of the plague, but its indeterminate character that breeds in many the sense of helplessness. There are forms which the most stolid observer will pronounce intolerable outrages ; but between these and the modes of attracting attention, which even the most fastidious would not think it compatible with the necessary give and take of modern society to prohibit, there are an infinite number of gradations. Where are you to draw the line is the question one hears constantly from lips that are still quivering with indignation at the suffer- ings which mankind is — these same lips aver — irredeemably destined to endure. 1 want these cheerless critics (who, for the most part, lay claim to penetration) to tell me plainly — whether they propose to draw the line nowhere ? Do they mean that license shall be absolute ; that a man shall be free to do anything and everything that is right in his own sight, without regard to the pain and the loss it may cause to the sight of the indefinite number of persons called the community. For the choice lies between regulation and chaos. The point 31 is not whether we are to submit to things as they are, but whether we are to consent now, that we ourselves and our children after us, shall endure things as they are certain, unless the process of morbid development be checked, to grow to. Multiply by any rule of pro- gression the features that are offensive in the world to-day, and you will have a measure of the sort of world posterity will have to live in Think, too, of what that posterity will be if nurtured amid surround- ings where sordid growths have been permitted to choke and extinguish all beauty and dignity and repose. Comeliness, that neutral state, neither of charm nor of repulsiveness, may be reconciled — if we will — with every reasonable requirement of trade and industry and material convenience. It is for us to decide, and to decide now. I will not charge any man with acting unfairly when the step he takes is one the law permits him to take. But I maintain that the exceptional advantage which a particular firm obtains over competing firms by advertising, is one that may involve so much social harm as to make restraint — according to accepted canons of public policy — imperative. The more the system of attracting custom by notifications (good or bad, artistic or vulgarly obtrusive) is practised, the more necessity will there be for practising it. This is not speculation, but the result of observation. One maker of one article takes to spending money in de- facing the public prospect in town or country. All others follow suit. The article is just the same as before ; but the consumer has to pay for the torture aforesaid, as well as for the ordinary cost of production. A draper, who has for years earned an honourable livelihood by selling fabrics of pure wool, thinks a huge painted board will draw a little additional custom. The draper on the opposite side of the way has, in self-defence, to get a still larger hatchment affixed to his premises. So the thing 32 grows and grows, till by-and-bye the street is one mass of mere signboards ; its architectural features disappear, an Elizabethan house is undistinguishable from one of the reign of Victoria, and the end of it all is that a stranger who w^ants to get a pair of stockings cannot, in the blaze of intimations, discover where the shop is for the merchandise he seeks. I recognize, of course, the value and the utility of many business announcements. Even if they were superfluous, it would be no part of my present purpose to reprehend their employment. I am not arguing against posters as posters or even against enamelled plates as enamelled plates. Many of the printed pic- tures which meet the eye of the pedestrian are (in my unlearned judgment) admirable in design, in tone, and in colour. No one dreams of banishing them. We must even put up with a certain measure of hideousness in detail. We are not discussing the ethics of advertising or the comparative merits of modern architects and of the artists who seek a more transient renown by placing their pencil at the service of trade enterprise. The proposition for which I claim assent is that if license in specta- cular advertising takes forms or reaches dimensions which constitute a public evil, it is the veriest clap- trap to object to authoritative interference on the ground that trade is thereby hampered. The great bulk of the trade of the country (which, happily as yet, does not resort to this wasteful mode of competition) remains unaffected. To the businesses which have been disorganized and demoralized by its adoption, limitation would bring relief. Spectacular touting for custom simply enriches one concern at the expense of another. With trade, in the proper sense, it has no more to do than green fly has with the growth of roses. But I have to point out to the contractors, who are already teaching their workpeople to cry that the craft is in danger, a consideration that they in their 33 wisdom have overlooked. To prohibit absolutely the most offensive abuses of the present liberty, and to subject generally to rigid restraints the exhibition of notices appealing to the public eye, would not neces- sarily reduce the opportunities of advertisers or the profits of those who own or rent stations. To limit the supply of hoardings will (according to political economy, orthodox and unorthodox) raise their value. The available space will be less, and accordingly each bill or tablet must be reduced in size. Even the bill- stickers and the printers would not suffer, since this would entail more rapid changes of the afhches. If the same measure is applied to all, there is pre- judice to none. It is the apparently illimitable vista open to the paste pot and hammer, that has led to the appalling increase in — I had almost said — the acreage of the fin de siecle poster. If all are trimmed to more reasonable superficies, each will give its message quite as impressively. Diana of the Hoardings may be as potent a divinity as Demetrius would fain make out, but there is no likelihood of any grave decline in offerings at her shrine. All the teachers of the new doctrine demand is that her images shall be kept to appropriate groves. They are not indifferent to individual liberty or to personal rights. Urave as is the injury done to society by the delay in bringing advertising (like other activities that trench upon the public sphere) under control, regard ought to be paid to the vested interests which our want of foresight has allowed to grow up. But in truth, the various enterprises sup- posed to be interested in resisting reform, have little more to fear than interference. I am not blind to the difficulty on this score, for the ordinary business temperament is much more ruffled by the possibility of having to modify existing routine than by the certainty of absolute loss. But reflection and, let us trust, a sense of public duty should induce railway D 34 directors and advertising contractors to submit with a good grace to the inevitable. Some of the advertisers have acquired a reputation for being inventive. Their operations appear to me to depend rather on effrontery. But if we give them credit for ingenuity we must presume that they will not enjoy the sport less, when obliged to conform to the Rules of the Game. Apart from this, the notion that the classes who have selfish reasons for opposing restriction are too formidable to be defied, is a figment of the incuri- ous imagination. Why should the manufacturers who have got into the way of soliciting custom by the familiar emblazonments, fret themselves because they hear that in future they are not to have their names and their wares associated with the desecration of scenes of special interest or beauty, or set forth with absolute disregard of the feelings of decent citizens ? Most of them, remember, have taken to the thing reluctantly and in self defence. They will be well pleased to obey rules the necessity of which they must, as men of good will, recognize, and by whicli their pushing rivals are equally restrained. But in fact the total number of merchants, makers, dealers, and managers who solicit custom by the "peculiar in- stitution," is insignificant when compared with those who have faith in the quality of their goods and who confine themselves to the ordinary channels of respectable trade. Every shopkeeper who trusts to integrity and industry will be on our side in withstanding the preposterous claims to immunity advanced by the huge puffing firms. Every old- fashioned manufacturing firm will join us in rejecting the pretensions of a class which consists largely of parvenus and impostors. Every lover of nature, everyone who hates mendacity and vulgarity, every- one who values dignity and propriety in our towns, will be with us so far as we aim at curbing license. 35 If the vast majority of Englishmen are lukewarm or apathetic, they will not, at any rate, have the smallest inducements to assist the defacer. Is it worth while asking which party to the conflict — if conflict there is to be^ — will have the advantage of numbers and in- fluence ? The press, we are sometimes told, has close relations with the contractors. No doubt, but the conductors of our public journals are not only very en- lightened, but remarkably shrewd men. They will see that for every legitimate purpose of spectacular announcement there will remain adequate facilities. So far as a certain margin of opportunity is cut off, the newspaper manager will at once perceive that he must himself benefit. The wisdom and morality of advertising are not in question now. We are con- cerned only with the hard facts, that to whatever extent the streets and country lanes and river banks are closed against the advertiser, to that extent he will be under an inducement to transfer his opera- tions and his payments to the columns of the public journals. This alternative has to be taken into consideration in estimating the position of the " advertising contractor." But I own I have a better opinion of those with whom we have to deal, than have some who, without receiving a brief, have made haste to claim them as clients. Many of the advertisers, as has been said, are not willing and deliberate offenders. It is surely uncharitable to credit them, in the absence of proof, with want of taste or of conscience. If a man finds that a landowner throws his preserves open to all comers is he to be branded as a poacher ? And if society has not expressly prohibited assaults upon its nerves, is an enterprising business man, who makes the most of the chance, to be sneered at as a Philistine ? I like to think that the great advertisers have refined susceptibilities when they are at home. J do not think they parade the cherished emblems in 36 their parks, and I know that some of them take pains to screen themselves in their Highland retreats against the intrusion of the mere wayfarer too inconsiderately keen in pursuit of the picturesque. One managing director of a notorious soap concern has explained that he is animated by a desire to encourage British art and to extend the range of honourable employment, while an even more famous pill man has pleaded duty to the fishermen as his compelling reason tor presenting to them sails em- bellished with his trade legend. But in all serious- ness it may be assumed that some at least of the more important contractors are honestly anxious to avoid superfluous offence, and if approached in the right spirit would willingly meet us half way. Nor must the worldly-wise reformer overlook the advantage he would have in appealing to the merely selfish instinct of the inveterate advertiser. This class has already acquired publicity, and so far has made commercial hay while the sun of unre- strained liberty was shining. If the system of regula- tion does not narrow his sphere of action he has nothing to complain of. But if it does narrow it he has the consolation of being so far protected against a younger generation of rivals. As to the coming race of pushing business men, they will accept the situation which law and usage for the time being presents to them. It is only change that causes friction. We have all got accustomed to thousands of restrictions, which twenty years ago many true-born Britons would resent or laugh at. But now it would require some moral courage to pro- pose to go back to the obsolete and barbaric license. The methods of trade naturally adapt them- selves to the arrangements of society. Real enterprise and ingenuity rejoices in making the best of the con- ditions prescribed. The English genius — though no one likes to admit it — is essentially imitative. Our 37 commerce has pushed itself all over the world, but always by following accepted lines. Every merchant, manufacturer, the spirited conductors of our leading journals, all keep their eye, not on what is ideally possible, but on each other's movements. The net result is advance, but cautious, gradual advance. Excellent as this habit is, it has, for want of external regulation, worked out badly in the " publicity " de- partment. Everyone tries to do what his neighbour does, only a little more so. In other things authority has stepped in to set wholesome bounds to private competition. Tardily but strenuously we have now^ to claim that the aspect of thoroughfares and of the open country is as much a matter of public concern as the cleanli- ness of the streets, ease of traffic, safeguards against infection and atmospheric pollution. We are in our turn only following the steps of those who adjusted the law on other subjects to the new needs or the better intelligence of a growing and complex civilisation. No one is allowed to build on his own ground without regard to his fellows and a nice observance of the precise requirements of municipal bye-laws. A manufacturer is bound (by the letter of the law) to consume his own smoke. Whatever the private con- victions of the householder may be, he is compelled to have a prescribed system of drains. The obnoxi- ous barrel-organ man must go round the corner at a hint from the owner of tortured ears. Surely it is not so much pedantry as flat nonsense to pretend that the citizen who, in every other phase of his life, has to respect ordinances framed in the general interest, shall be free to establish eyesores when and where he pleases, and perhaps spoil, by some garish addition, a scene which nature has made pleasing or which the lavish outlay of public monies has been employed to render attractive and imposing. By endowing technical schools and art museums, by 38 making and maintaining parks and gardens, public authority has, once for all, recognised that the delight of the eye is a matter of national policy. It follows that to vindicate the right of the sight to repose, to freedom from wanton affront, is no less an elementary duty. To fulfil the duty it is only necessary to subject to regulation the imitative tendency which scatters offence over the land. Individualism is a creed entitled to all respect. But it has nothing to do with the considerations advanced here. We are not proposing to dictate to anyone how he shall regulate his life or conduct his business. It is stipulated only that he must not violate theindividual rights of others. If a man's house is his own, the thoroughfare belongs to the community. He has no more right to vex the sight of the thousands who pass his way with a dazzling announcement than to flash the sun in their eyes from his first floor with the help of a pocket mirror. As a matter of fact, many of the appendages objected to, occupy a space in air which is public property. To sum up. We have not to deal with an ineradicable and irrepressible tendency of human nature, but with a practice adopted by a compara- tively limited class. It is not a moral disease of society, but an inconvenience due to the absence of restraint on individual action. By an oversight, law has not, in this instance, accommodated itself to the dictates of public utility. The " moral question " — so far as there is one — consists in making the necessary adjustment. " Repression " is a very misleading account of the remedial policy contemplated. Municipal regulation and the voluntary play of social effort will set up a standard to which all good citizens will gladly conform, and which after a little will rank as a rule of conduct of no less obvious and natural obliga- tion than that which forbids wanton molestation and intrusion in other departments of life. ■69 The difficulty of " drawing the line " need not detain us. There is no accepted canon of taste in art or conduct ; yet official departments are per- petually deciding between competitive designs for public edifices, and there is a certain standard of decent behaviour which no one, however lacking fine feeling, ventures to transgress. Juries of twelve men chosen at random are every day interpreting, with reference to transactions between individuals, such vague phrases as " good faith/' " due care and attention," " reasonable despatch," " marketable con- dition," and so on. For our purpose, it will do very well if we say that the line of the "permissible" should be drawn at what the general sense of those who live in a locality or frequent it agree to permit. A society, of whose precise methods full particulars will be found in the appendix, has been formed to give effect to this view of public duty. Here it may be convenient to present in less formidable detail some account of its aim : — " I ought to say at the outset that we do not dream of suppressing posters or abolishing the use of tem- porary hoardings as advertising stations. Whatever some of us may think about the taste or the morality of some of the bills, we are all agreed that we have to accept, as an inevitable incident of modern life, the display of announcements pictorial or printed, and we do not think it practicable to discrimmate between those that are useful and those that are superfluous, those that are in good taste or those that are unsightly or vulgar. But we do contend that there ought to be some limit as regards the character, position, and size of advertising stations ; we think there are places where they ought not to be allowed at all ; in brief, we want to substitute control for the present license ; and for reasons it would be tedious to go into we hold that the public can be protected against much that causes pain and interferes with enjoyment, without 40 imposing any restraint on trade, or appreciably inter- fering with the earnings of those now interested in the business of advertising. "The means we contemplate are chiefly these : " I. A change in the law by which the local repre- sentative authorities will be empowered to regulate public displays of advertising notices of all kinds — boards, tablets on walls and so on, as well as posters — just as they now lay down rules for building, for traffic, for sanitary appliances, and many other things. The extent to which the power conferred will be used will depend on the feelings of the electors. In some places there will be a wish for greater, in other for less restraint : in some perhaps there will be no desire at all for change. The Councils, we hope, will adapt their rules to the wants of the different localities within their jurisdiction — treating, for instance, a quiet suburban road and a busy business street in different ways. We trust, however, that there will be in many localities a veto on sky signs, advertisements on chimneys and towers and parapets, the painted boards in fields, which have lately multiplied so rapidly and make a railway journey a nightmare ; straggling posters and tablets on walls, gigantic hoardings, the more glaring defacements on town sites of particular historical or architectural interest, or at picturesque rural spots. "II. \\'henever application is made to Parliament by Railway Companies or other bodies for powers to take up land, we aim at procuring the insertion of provisions subjecting to the necessary regulation the use of any portion of the fabric or the land for adver- tising purposes. " III. Some of us advocate a special impost on all exposed advertisements ; but this opens up many delicate issues of policy which have still to be carefully examined. " IV. And — to omit minor matters — we have a 41 common understanding that as members we will each at his own discretion abstain (as far as may be) from using commodities which he personally feels are ad- vertised in an offensive way, or patronising establish- ments which he regards as exceptionally unscrupulous in advertising display. The design is not to punish the advertisers, but (i) to teach them that the devices they resort to may repel rather than attract customers, and (2) to encourage firms that do not resort to them. The Society does not countenance any action beyond the strict intention of this paragraph. " In order to secure the enforcement of the amended law when we get it — we are much interested in pro- moting the formation of local associations which some of us believe might — besides occupying them- selves with the advertisement evil — do much generally to keep the aspect of town and country picturesque, or — where grace is out of the question — to keep it as little unsightly as possible. These local associations would, also, help us greatly in our appeal to public opinion. " The subscription of members is 2s. 6d. per annum, but donations are welcome from those able and anxious to give more. The services of the officers, it need hardly be said, are honorary." It will be observed that we try to hit the happy mean between extravagant hope and blank despair. Because we hold that disfigurements are not as a rule connected with any of the real utilities of ordinary life and effort, and because we count advertisements, in one form or another, to be among the principal causes of disfigurement, it does not at all follow that we contemplate as a practicable ideal the removal of all eyesores or the suppression of all objectionable symbols of trade puffery. We take note of the conditions with which we have to deal, and are content — in the present phase of public sentiment — to reduce the evil ; to circumscribe its 42 sphere ; to set limits to its growth. We set up no- fantastic ideal of aesthetic rectitude. We abjure the notion that we or any other body can pretend to be a committee of taste. Some will think perhaps that we attempt too much, others will be disappointed because we aim at too little. Yet we hope to do some service to the State. We plead that if our scheme- contains the promise of any sensible and permanent abatement of an acknowledged evil, it ought not to be set aside because it does not purport to make a clean sweep of all that offends the fastidious. No movement can be " serious " or " practical " that is not based upon an appreciation of the minute ramifications of the tendency we deplore, and does not aim at making provision for meeting each detail with the expedient appropriate to the special need. It is the indeterminate character of the evil that alone makes it formidable. Its wide diffusion and fluctuat- ing character bewilders and disheartens many. How, it is asked, is the hammer of regulation to be brought to bear on an indefinite number of irritating atoms, varying infinitely in shape and size and texture?" How, too, is the diversity of sensibilities to be provided for? Some are galled by posters mainly, while others would gladly purchase deliverance from the painted board and metal plate variety by a broad toleration of hoardings. Some men have long sight, others short; that is to say, some are vexed by objects that show themselves at a dis- tance, while others are exempt till they come within close range. Some, again, have the happy gift of being able to concentrate visual attention on a single feature. The neighbourhood of the pier with its flashy panorama of placards does not spoil their appreciation of the sea or even of the long line of cliffs; while others- cannot regard a detail save in relation to the whole landscape. Some have not that perfect delicacy of sight which enables them to perceive the subtle 43" nuances of mist and vapour; of gleam and glow. They miss an intense pleasure, but they are to some extent recompensed by an immunity from the extreme forms of pain. Sylvanus loves the country, and has cultivated a pessimistic calm, which enables him to take the degradation of town life as a necessary evil. Urbanus has a taste for city picturesque, and deplores the ravage wrought on the stately fa9ades. Yet another distinction must be mentioned which is fundamental. There are eyes that can be blind when there is nothing pleasant to look at. Others there are that cannot help regarding most closely what they most dislike. There are eyes which are not caught by legible characters, and eyes that must read whatever print assails them. There are, again, many to whom advertising is offensive, not because it offends the artistic taste, but because it is (through the eye) a vulgar intrusion on their intellectual calm. To them the perpetual iteration of one name or phrase in glaring colours, jars on the nerves as much as the persistent solicitations of the same begging im- postor at the same street corner. If a shopkeeper runs after a citizen, takes him by the collar or follows him down the street, shouting out that he has pills to sell of extraordinary merit, the victim can appeal to the policeman ; why should there be no relief when the same shopkeeper presents himself at every turn in the shameless livery of paint or printing ink or glaze. There are others still to whom the affront to the sight and the breach of good manners is accentuated by moral indignation at the mechanical bombast or the gross and cruel lying. The man who for the sake of personal gain, announces that his nostrum is a specific, when he knows perfectly well that it has failed and must fail in the vast majority of cases, and in many must do grievous injury, is surely outside the pale of charity. The tricks of trade, the lowered tone of commercial ethics are common- u place themes. It would be presumptuous to dogma- tise about the vexed questions of mercantile morality. But those who believe that there is a decay of probity cannot help connecting it with the profuse and garish dishonesties of the ubiquitous placards. " If these mendacities," they say within themselves, " can be flaunted in the face of a church-going community, what wonder that rectitude is no longer reverenced as the guide of conduct ? " Lastly may be mentioned, with all deference, an eminently influential class which objects strongly, though it does not feel acutely. At one pole is the opulent personage who does not like to have the neighbourhood of his highly-rented villa degraded to the level of a poor district ; and at another the exemplary lodging-house keeper, who understands that an efflorescence of posters interferes sadly with her chance of getting good tenants for the drawing- room floor. The conclusion to which this analysis is intended to lead is that if we are to deal effectually with the pro- tean evil we must marshal against it not one phase or school of disapproval, but every phase and school. Some of us have the combative temperament : they love the delights of battle, and they scorn any counsel which does not mean sharp, direct conflict. Others are men of peace : averse to controversial collision with their fellow-men. The proposal is to unite and to co-ordinate all these various discontents. Those who are peculiarly sensitive to one aspect of the evil can help themselves by co-operating with those who feel another. It each declines to join in a scheme because, tried by his individual standard, it aims at too much or too little ; if he confines himself to the angle which causes him acute pain, and ignores the angle that afflicts his neighbour, there will be relief for none. The Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising has, it will be observed, as a col- ^ O.-THE A ^j. UNIVERSITY J lateral object that of " protecting and^pr onTO t TTT g the picturesque simplicity of rural and river scenes, and the dignity and propriety of our large towns." It need not be disguised that its labours to this end will be very largely preventive. Yet its spirit and — so far as it rests upon local efforts — its methods will be positive and constructive. It is felt that cast-iron enactments of a broadly prohibitory kind would be useless. Every locality must depend for exemption from superfluous disfigurement, and for growth in the amenities, on the loving care and vigilance of a body of residents, who know precisely what is wanted, and what the play of local sentiment will permit to be done. Such a body would, in the dreams of some of us, be interested quite as much in promoting improvements as in checking abuses. It would not be indifferent to play-grounds and parks. It would help Con- servators and Local Boards in contriving and carrying out all the little odds and ends by which the aspect of towns and villages may be immensely improved, but which, just because they are small things, are hardly susceptible of official treatment. I have been laughed at for suggesting the planting of trees and saplings as a proper function ; yet anyone who analyzes the charm of a pretty country town must be conscious of the obligation he owes to some long- departed worthy who in his day believed in the duty of planting. Every traveller knows how a simple fountain, or a shrine at a street corner, converts the commonplace into a thing of beauty. Why should modern England be incapable of learning a lesson from mediaeval Italy ? Such local bodies as are here contemplated would be a sort of Standing Committee for stray suggestions regarding small improvements and reforms which are admitted to be sound, yet often end in nothing for lack of some fixed organization. They would also be Tallying points for various scattered interests that 46 languish just because they are isolated. Who does not wish well to the societies which aim at protecting our native fauna and flora : yet in how many districts can they be said to constitute an effective force ? It is necessary that they should exist on a specific basis; but would they not gain much in working energy if, for local purposes, the disciples federated themselves with others whose instincts tended in the same direction ? Sketching clubs and archaeological societies might well come under the same umbrella — the common bond being a loving interest in "the place." Allotments may be mentioned as a subject which might be a legitimate matter of concern to associa- tions in the rural districts. I think most people who are enthusiastic about rural beauty are still more enthusiastic about the comfort and well-being of the labourer. Better a thousand times have hideousness than hunger. But there is no reason why the multi- plication of the poor man's gardens should be a blot on a landscape. Nature always provides a mellow- ing drapery — if only a little kindly prevision allows nature a chance. There have been complaints that some landlords are reluctant to give land for small holdings. Let us hope they are not well founded. But the agrarian reformer will find a more ready wel- come if he show a tenderness for scenery. Spoiling a landscape does not make the three acres more fruitful or the cow more profitable. Concurrently with specific eftbrts at protection would be the educational activity of the local associations. It is part of the English character to love " respect- abilitv^' and "morality," and it should be easy to enlist popular sentiment under both these heads on our side. The present writer, for his part, has a firm belief that the people do in their hearts prefer order and comeliness to sordid chaos. It will not be quite amiss if in the course of time 47 ■we get a sort of Mrs. Grundv prestige in these matters. 'I'he Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings -deals, not always suavely, with niceties that are heyond the ken of the ordinary country clergyman : yet, I am told, such is the vague awe produced hy their ency- clicals that the most unsophisticated of vicars never dreams now of touching the stonework of his Church till he has taken the advice of the cognoscenti. Let us hope that we also in our small way will put into the air the doctrine of congruity and sightliness. The efforts of the local associations, I think, are more likely to be repressive for our specific purpose if they are •also benevolent and educational. Those who aire ady take an interest in the preservation of ancient buildings — in securiniT and extending parks, pleasuri^-grounds and open spaces — in providing good music for the many — in lessening the pain caus'^d by music of the other kind, t>y street cries nnd steam whistles — in vindicating the libeities of country paths and waterways — nay, in the humble practice of planting trees here and there where there is ugliness to conceal or beauty to heighten — all these are naturally on our side. It would h^ an ■excellent economy of labour if some of the existino" <igencies would add to their beneficent functions those that we would assign to our local association — in other yvords, would become the local association. It is hardly necessary to explain that the movement will not involve the customary array of auxiliary hranches, collecting cards, and pleasing annual reports. These local societies are to be, if not absolutely autoch- thonous, at any rate autonomous, and thev will be ■expressly free from the degrading bond of tribute. ] -am afraid we cannot quite avoid deputations from the parent society^ but these will not be frequent, and will take care not to give themselves airs. In most places the prolific |:)rovincial soil will, it is hoped, spon- taneously produce its own Hampdens, but in some iess favoured spots a husbandman may be despatched 48 from headquarters not so much to sow the seed as to start the growth. In plain words, it will be for people on the spot to look after the comeliness of their own district, to be either fastidious or lax at their own discretion. The local societies will be executive groups, managing permanently their own affairs, and looking outside onlv for the sort of help that they cannot, as isolated bodies, dispense with. The relation between the National Society and the local associations may be thus defined. To effect our end the law must, it would appear, be amended. Parliament, we hope, will confer on the representative bodies already charged with local administration, power to frame suitable regulations, and it must be the busi- ness of the local associations, whose existence is as- sumed, to see that Boards and Councils avail them- selves of the powers, and that they are duly enforced. To bring the necessary pressure to bear on Parlia- ment, and, generally speaking, to promote the forma- tion and to co-ordinate the effort of the various local societies, the central organization is necessary. It would, besides, in a quiet, modest way, set itself to create a sound public opinion on the subject by the time-honoured method of literature and lectures. We are informed, on very high authority in these matters, that provisions may be foui;d scatteied through a great number of Acts which might lend themselves to our purpose. Existing statutes furnish us with en- couraging precedents and serviceable analogies. They occur (as an expert will easily believe), for the most part, in Acts that were passed at the initiative of private Members. The object in view was to put down some- thing or other that appeared to the promoter flagrantly objectionable; but, thanks to the fine freedom of the draughting, the provisions enacted would cover a very much larger field than was intended by the Member in charge. Even within their original intention they form collectively a very resjK-ctable armoury of j)ositive pro- 49 hibitions. We can hardly, however, dare to hope that scrutiny will show they give us all we want. Time will be required to develop the relations with the local societies, but speaking generally, we hope to help in calling local sentiment into active play, stimu- lating it where it is languid and assisting it where external help is needed. We shall do our best to make the experience gained in one place available for others ; to be a medium of intercourse and a centre of suggestion. Not the least useful of the con- templated functions will be that of advising the local associations in cases of doubt and difficulty. The National Society will seek to prevent the overlapping of areas, or the occurrence of gaps in the network : and of some branches of the work, which have a national rather than a local importance, it might take exclusive and immediate charge. How local societies are to spring into being and constitute themselves is a problem which will solve itself in different places in different ways. They will have to settle then for themselves the appropriate mode of work. Judgment, temper, a fine regard for circumstances, will be necessary to avoid the chance of mischievous friction. No code can anticipate all the fluctuating conditions of each case ; no handbook can lay down dogmatic rules of procedure. Granted reasonableness and good feeling on the part of the reformers, there is little prospect of serious opposition. But our friends must neither ride full tilt against windmills, nor attack cottages with field artillery. It would be absurd to set up the same standard of visual propriety for the New Cut and for the sweet village of Totteridge. The practical ideal must have some rational relation to the average feeling of the average resident. Compulsion is essential, but it must be compulsion tempered in practice by Local Option. Reasons have been set forth in the first part of this pamphlet for the belief that a common understanding E 50 on the part of the members to abstain from purchasing commodities which they severally feel to be adver- tised in an objectionable way, or from patronizing establishments similarly open to reproach, would be efhcacious. I may be permitted to say that, personally, I am intensely averse to anything in the shape of social persecution — whether it be called boycotting or exclusive dealing — and if this feature presented itself to my mind mainly as a distinctly punitive measure I should hesitate about accepting or commending it. It has been remarked that you are no more justified in avoiding a man's shop because it is not decorated to your liking than in withdrawing your custom because you do not like the cut of his trousers ; that a pill pro- prietor is as much entitled to put his name at intervals of every ten yards all the way from Paddington to Milford Haven as other people are to append their signature to a letter. But suppose the shopkeeper persistently thrusts himself and his trousers on my attention, under the impression that this was a good way of getting me to patronize his establishment, would it not be a kind- ness and a duty to correct his error by going to some other trader, whose tastes in tailoring approximated more closely to mine? And if my correspondent persisted in sending me batches of begging letters by every post, would I not be justified in letting him know that he did not improve his chance of ex- periencing my benevolence by this intrusive multiplica- tion of signatures. The parallel is absolute. The oilman does not wish to annoy me by sticking a placard of Byle's Blue on his house front ; he thinks it is the way to catch custom. Surely we who are not susceptible to the lure, owe it to the poor deluded man to convince him of his error, and so save him from being — what as a respectable citizen he does not desire to be — a nuisance to his neighbours. Stupid imitation, it cannot be too explicitly reiterated, 51 accounts to a very large extent for the spread of puffing disfigurements. There must, of course, be no black list of obnoxious firms. Each member must independently and spon- taneously form his own decision as to whether there is need of teaching the lesson. By so doing he will display due reverence for law, morality, and economy. If Bloggs sticks the name of himself and his nostrum in buff and blue on a series of enamelled plates, and if he gets a contractor to hammer these at intervals of every ten yards into every wall that he can hire within an indefinite area, he calculates that he will plague a remunerative number of passers-by into a vivid recollection of the commodity he wants to sell, and that, accordingly, the victim will purchase it in preference to that of a more modest competitor in the manufacturing line. Bloggs and the contractor will go on extending these operations as long as experience justifies Bloggs^ calculations. But Bloggs is no fool, and when he finds that he loses custom instead of gaining it Bloggs will desist. It has sometimes been objected that since those who are pained by advertisements are not the people whom advertisements would influence, there would be no dis- suasive efficacy in the suggested understanding. But I do not admit that the two classes are distinct. Many a lady who feels the unkindness of the enamelled plates has hitherto allowed her housekeeper to buy the stuff that is thus cruelly and unfairly pushed. Every owner of a large establishment, domestic or industrial, would have much power in the way of du'ecting con- sumption into moral lines. Assume that people who .are peculiarly sensitive to disfigurement never take .patent specifics, is it probable that among those who do, there are not many who may be led, by the force of reason and e^^ample, to see that it is not right to en- -courage practices that rob the country of its charm ? 52 I must here repeat my own absolute faith, founded on observation and particular inquiry, that the masses of the people are not indifferent to desecration. But_, in any case, a great number of articles which collectively enjoy much "dishonourable mention" of the kind \\e are condemning, appeal only to those who, being well- to-do, must be credited with a rudimentary preference for decency and order. Pianos, for instance, and champagne, and toilet soap at fancy piices, and Turkish cigarettes, and choice flower seeds are not the sort of thing for which it is worth anyone^s while to solicit the custom of the travelling " masses." Granted that we are not likely to annihilate the profits the mere quack medicine man derives from wholesale disfigurement, we shall deprive him of his more dignified partners in evil^ and leave him to be dealt with, by more direct measures,, as an exceptional nuisance. At the very lowest esti- mate, the action we recommend would be a continuous and extending protest of material propagandist virtue. As another illustration of the use of individual op- portunity, let me say that landlords have it in their power to create "oases" of repose by putting in restrictive conditions in building and other leases. It is not quite a vain dream that some day or other the family lawyer, when consulted about developing the estate of a client, will suggest that if there be a rigid" rule against trade blazonry of all kinds, and if arrange- ments be made with the Railway Company to keep the local station decent in this respect, fancy rents will be secured. One such experiment would lead to many more — for it would undoubtedly succeed. By-and-bye, organizers of exhibitions would find it profitable to ensure for portions, at least, of the grounds the repose for which so many long. Perhaps — who knows r — the Directors of the Crystal Palace would discover that the catch-penny boards deprive them of many a solid shilling or high-class half-crown. Hotel proprietors — 53 though very slow to learn — would also attain to wisdom in the end. On some of the great London estates the rule of pro- hibition is already in force. I do not think that the noble landlords suffer ; I am sure that the residents greatly gain. The tendency of legislation nowadays is to reduce the power — for good as well as evil — of the private proprietor. All the more need, then, is there to ensm-e that the County Councils and Corporations rshall be in a position to do what, confessedly, has been well done under the ancien regime. A series of instances, not wholly imaginary, may ■help us to think out the appropriate modes of action in contrasted cases. I have endeavoured to coniemplate the problem, both as a whole and in its several parts, -and it seems only fair to ask that the value of one of the component features of the suggested solution shall not be tested by a reference to conditions to which it was ■never intended to apply. To our illustrations : There is a row of cottages not as •well built as could be wished, but possessed of that exquisite charm of picturesqueness which is often .associated with wet clay floors and lozenge windows that have not been opened for centuries. Yet there the people are, not discontented, as times go, with their lot and happy in the little folks who have (in ■contempt of sanitary science) the rosiest of cheeks and the sturdiest of legs. If the landlord thought of replacing them with habitations more suited to the use of man, though less pleasing to the eye, I, for one, should applaud that beneficent piece of vandalism. But I thmk the local society (supposing the landlord were a Gallio as regards rural beauties) might here, with great .advantage and general approval, induce him (through the good offices of those who enjoyed his acquaintance ■or by frankly throwing themselves on his good nature) to make the new cottages as little unsightly as ))ossible. If, indeed, they could only get the builder to thmk, first 54 and only, of making the houses comfortable and service- able, the result could not be displeasing. The creepers might (by a little management) be restored once more to the walls, the white lilies and the roses dealt with tenderly by the bricklayers, and in a year or so the row would have settled down to comeliness, and no small part of the former beauty. But supposing the families in the big houses of the neighbourhood are too modest to connect themselves with ''movements," or too diffident to allow their names to appear in print, or too penetrating and prpctical to admit that anything can ever be done to withstand the Philistine tendencies of the age, what will ensue? The builder (not by malice, but by force of mere indolent routine and lack of interest iii better things) will work his own will. Then the genteel families will shudder and talk over their billiards about that awful monstrosity in yellow brick that has supplanted the perfectly charming bit of mediaevalisni they all so loved ; nay, even the passing bicyclist (though he has still his sixty miles to do before night- fall and can't spare time for scenery and that sort of thing) flashes a glance over the handle of his machine and — misses something. Imagine now that our pretty cottages remain; for what landowner can afford, in these days of depres- sion, to spend money on mere doctor^s fads ? Bv- and-bye there comes along a plausible gentleman. It is one of my firm beliefs that he invariably comes in a gig. He descends, picks out a house with an eligible bit of showy wall, converses a little with the good woman. The negotiation is brief but satisfactory. The family is richer by, say half-a-crown, and next day the blushing roses look pale beside tiie gorgeous tablet, which mentions unceasingly to earth and heaven the name of Brass's Blue or of the Gambling Gazette. This is the beginning of the end. Let us try to work the transaction out in figures. Gain to the tenant of the house, half-a-crown; gain to Messrs. Brass, the erection of the ten thousandth testi- 55 monial to their shamelessness and (possibly) a slight enhancement of the disagreeable impression which a contemplation of the remaining nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine testimonials has left on the minds of that unhappy class of travellers who cannot help looking at what they detest. Loss, per contra, the happiness which the aspect of the unspoilt cottages gave to an infinite succession of not quite unworthy men and women, whom duty or pleasure led along the road. I admit at once that if there were an Act, as we mean there shall be, empowering the local authorities to make a bye-law declaring the exhibition of any unsanctioned notice within the visible horizon of a thoroughfare an ofience, the evil might be averted or remedied. But is it quite a case for invoking the rigour of the law and provoking the resentment with which ordinary human nature regards the interference of Boards ? We must have coercion in reserve, but we need not put it in evidence. The iron hand will work best with the help of a velvet glove. We must in every way diminish friction. Let us have legal restriction by all means, but be it meanwhile our duty and our aim to create that atmosphere of intelligent assent in which law can work, rather as a standard to be conformed to than as a code of penalties to be shunned. To those who pin their faith on authorita- tive repression, I answer that the kindly vigilance of the local society is a factor essential to the success of their policy. It is not enough to call force into being : there must be machinery through which the force can operate, and no particle of energy should be uselessly expended for lack of lubricants. Let us pass to another sample case. There is a castle majestic in its decay, rich in historic associations, a stronghold which barred the way of conquerors and still keeps watch and ward over the narrow passage through green hills^ which cut off the " Isle of Purbeck" from the rest of Britain. From the summit of the keep the eye ranges over a landscape of singular 56 and, with trifling exceptions, of absolutely unblemished loveliness. Close to the outer circle of the vast enclosing walls lies a town which, if it were in Ger- many, would be a place of pilgrimage for mediaevalists, and of this town — old-fashioned where it is not antique — the market-square is the central treasure. A quaint inn — worthy of the place — affords a hospit- able welcome to many a relay of visitors from the neigh- bouring watering-places. When I was there — some time since — the houses round looked as they might have looked in the days of Charles the First, though they were old even then. Only one thing was visible to remind the sentimental traveller that his lot was cast in nineteenth century times. But this was, alas ! fatally conclusive evidence of the fact, for, adhering somehow, in spite of the storms of years, to some of the most imposing of the fa9ades (there were shops below) were huge frames bearing what were still recognizable as the proclamations of a certain (household) soap. The firm that issued them have long since adopted what I must be permitted to call the enamelled iron system ; this was the forlorn relic of the age of canvas. Yet the faded placard, useless even as an advertisement, sufficed to cause the peculiar pain of marred loveliness, and even the coveys of excursionists would have carried away an infinitely more pleasant recollection of the place if the tattered gaudiness had not been there. If half-a-dozen visitors to the hotel had at brief intervals communicated to mine host the thoughts that were passing in their several minds he would, on mere calculations of business interest, have talked to his neighbours, to whom the picturesqueness of their town is a source of gain, and the abhorred emblem would have fed a bonfire. The owner of the mighty castle has shown in the arrangements within the walls the nicest care for picturesque propriety, but apparently allowed his interest and his influence to end at the great gateway. Here surely is a case for a local society. Can anyone suppose that half-a-dozen of the artists and 57 archaeologists who abound in the neighbourhood, if they only consented to believe that "something could be done/' would not be able, without incurring any outlay or any ill will, to restore Corfe to its romantic perfec- tion. Not far away is another town, once a port of some renown, and still in that happy position midway between decline and growth, which is so favourable to comeliness. And certainly it would be hard to imagine anything more pleasing than the wide thoroughfare which forms its centre. The grass grows at the sides over the paving-stones where departed fashion had its promenade. Houses of all periods, stately or modest, but nowhere wanting in charm, line this old English boulevard. But, alas ! at the end is a railway station — something in the red brick Swiss cottage style, as I remember, but no eyesore, for all that. Unluckily the yard around is enclosed with a paling, and stuck along the paling are — .T will not name the things again — and on one post I found a notice declaring to all and sundry that anyone defacing — " defacing ! " — or removing the objects would be prosecuted. Might not a local associa- tion have got the burgesses to take some pride in their town, and while respecting their own house fronts, bring pressure on the company to maintain the palings in decent simplicity. That abundant materials exist among the residents I was glad to satisfy myself by talking with some. What is lacking is the wave of impulse — the contagious spirit of organization. Am I, then, to be charged with proposing "• nothing serious,'' if I urge moral propagandism as an integral part of our scheme. Any lover of natural beauty or of the more complex charms that still abound in many an English town can recall an infinite number of instances in which a very slight exertion of influence at a very small sacrifice of the assumed interests of shopkeepers or manufac- turers would rescue fair prospects from disfigurements trivial in themselves, but ruinous to the repose of the 58 tout ensemble. There is a cathedral town in Somer- setshire that in twenty-four hours might be made beautiful as that storied Camelot of which it may, indeed^ have been in the eyes of Lord Tennyson the visible image. Far away in the north, in the very heart of a mining region, is another fane, more noble, if that may be, than Wells, and more superbly placed, per- haps, than any temple reared by human hands. Below the heights on which the cathedral and the ancient castle stands the river sweeps in gentle curve, and on either bank are woodland walks and garden wilds. Two- bridges cross the stream. From one — but I must not attempt to compete in words with the labours of a long line of painters. From the other the outlook would be no less one of exquisite beauty, if it had not occurred to someone to set up a huge framework in a chance patch of unoccupied land at one end and let it out for posters \ Durham is blessed with a University and a Corporation, but, apparently, both are waiting for a local association to convince the townsfolk that it is sound policy to see to the setting of the inestimable jewel of which they are the fortunate, though not wholly vigilant, guardians. This seems the place for remarking that the projected associations (whether at the centre or throughout the country) will, as a matter of course, take care that their views are presented both in Parliament and in the Municipal Councils, by sympathetic representatives. It vi'ould be an error from every point of view to make the vindication of the Rights of the Seeing Eye a test question or to add another issue to the perplexed tangle of politics. But as voters and ratepayers we should convince the candidate we severally prefer that we have convictions as stubborn on this subject as the ordinary party man has on any item of his Parliamentary pro- gramme. Conceive, next, one of the pleasant reaches on the Thames. I suppose the reason people go by steamer to Oxford, or navigate steam launches, or float through their holidays in lazy barges is that they find the scenery 59 soothing. Their taste, such as it is — I do not pretend that the main element in the happiness is the landscape — brings custom to a good many hotels. To conserve the grace that attracts is undoubtedly the commercial interest of the innkeepers. Yet I am told that in one ot" the loveliest spots, one of these persons has destroyed, even in the eyes of the most tolerant, the entire charm by setting up, high above the topmost branches of the trees, a colossal sky sign. There are recorded cases in which men who are fond in the abstract of maintaining that a house owner is entitled to do what he likes with his own have criticized this particular exercise of constitutional freedom, in terms that have shocked the passing bargee. We for our part will be moderate in speech. The law we hold ought to give the means of preventing this thing ; and the law, we intend, shall give the means. But meanwhile (since I am engaged in glorifying the force of extra legal effort) I desire to suggest that there is a remedy. No traveller need land at the spot that has been profaned. Editors of guide books, the younger race of whom have done splendid service in creating the taste for the picturesque and in making the treasures of scenery accessible, might with great advantage annotate with appropriate observations such outrages. No faithful member of our societies will miss a chance of protest- ing against these stupid barbarities. Considering how apt average men and women are to derive what they would call their opinions from the expressed opinions of others, judicious candour on this topic would have no insignificant effect in modifying average feeling. We all of us owe to others a part of our faculty of per- ception, and many a muscular young man, who at the beginning of his pilgrimage is set down in the smoking- room as an irreclaimable Philistine, has developed before his pedestrian tour is over much more than a rudimentary sense of the loveliness of the earth and sea and sky. Indifference is very much an affair of habit. Culture means only the result of utilized opportunities. 60 So much for the country, for the preservation of which nearly every one is soHcitous and comparatively sanguine. About towns there is less disposition to exercise faith and hope. Many frankly give them up as beyond the scope of rational effort. 1 have said my say at the outset about the assumption that cities are necessarily hideous. The view of Zurich from the terrace of the Polytechnic is a standing refutation of the doctrine of inherent ugliness, and if only any persuasion or legal compulsion swept from English manufacturing towns (Leeds for example) the Gar- gantuan inscriptions on roofs and chinnieys, and hoard- ings raised ad hoc, compelling the spectators to note that this is So-and-So's Coal Depot and that is So-and- So's Ironworks, there would be something impressive and grimly picturesque in that vast expanse of tapering chimneys belching smoke and huge factories shelter- ing the teeming life within. Beauty may be wanting ; but not poetry. But, in truth, cities are often recognized as " of high artistic merit." Why is Edin- burgh perennially packed with visitors ? Has there ever been an Academy E,xhibition without a picture of New- castle ? Is Dublin ugly? No, what bewilders and repels in these great seats of industry is not of the essence of city life. But I stipulate expressly for power on the part of those who govern, to keep the excrescences within bounds. Unless the Provost of the Scottish Athens and his colleagues interpose to pre- vent the newspaper offices round the Tol booth from proclaiming themselves in golden letters visible afar, and every charitable institution and hotel and business house from joining in the competition to catch the eye. Princes street will not long be the Mecca of romantic students. Sir Walter Scott himself would renounce the rock if he had to survey in close association with its bold escarpment of liquid red and tender green, this repulsive panorama of ticketed warehouses. This, I confess, appears to me a case in which nothing but stringent compulsion will serve, and the function of the 61 Local Association in Edinburgh will be to make the law operative. The same must be said of the close of Westminster and of the Thames as it flows through London. It is surely an afl'ront to practical intelligence that a spot dominated by a church dear to all men of English blood, consecrated by history as well as religion, and in architectural glory of supreme excellence^ should be exposed, as it now is, to the profanation of glaringly sordid surroundings. I am so far wanting in critical taste as to admire greatly the Houses of Parliament, and as the seat of the Legislature of the Empire they should command respect. To touch a responsive chord, be it added that they cost the nation an enormous amount. Include the parish church of St. Margaret's, and we have a group for which it would be hard to find a parallel in the world. Yet we — who claim to have some notion of business — allow this priceless possession to be besmeared and belittered at the caprice of anyone who happens to be a tenant of any of the houses or buildings round. A hospital announces in stupendous letters, on an enormous board, that it is supported by voluntary subscriptions; a place of amusement bedizens itself with posters that would be an outrage anywhere ; a railway station is plastered with unalluring bills ; it is much to the credit of the cafe keepers and sellers of cheap goods that they have shown comparative moderation. It would be tedious to chronicle in detail the series of analogous blots that you are compelled to observe as you pass from this disfigured holy place along the noble avenue of the Thames Embankment. Here the sky sign is seen in its most monstrous form : here the railway station reaches the ideal of glaring meanness : here official neglect goes hand in hand with private profanation. Yet to those who can nerve themselves to see profanation in its worst shape I can commend a visit to Tower Hill : the spot of all others that the sentiment of historic reverence might have induced the nation to protect. And all these are but types. Is there nothing here to save ? Is there no crying need of succour ? Yet another case. A great business thoroughfare. Houses on both sides. Some would be interesting as being old ; others would be w orth regard as being the conscientious work of accomplished architects. But all alike, without respect to age or status, are either themselves overlaid with trade announcements in huge letters of gold or glass or common painter's pigments, or killed by the show on the neighbouring premises. Here a huge gilt hat projects above the side path, and here a coffee pot of monstrous dimensions or a model stove (larger than life) tells that the trade of grocer or ironmonger is plied within. The one merit common to all these devices is that they so effectually compete with each other, eclipsed and eclipsing, that no single one is noted by the struggling throng of pedestrians. The crowd of human beings surges through a chaos of ineffectual glitter and colour. Trade is not helped, but the street is spoilt, and even the famous spire is lost in the be- wildering medley. Yet hardly any appreciable good results to the general commerce of the thoroughtare. Each individual shop-keeper, each tenant of an upper floor, has, or fancies he has, a special inducement to announce himself. Conspicuous he cannot be ; but in the fierce rivalrv he trusts to escape absolute eff'acement. Now, will any member of the Common Council tell me whether any wrong would have been done had the authorities of the city laid down years ago, and enforced ever since, a rule that every sign should keep within defined limits as regards position, size and design ? If he is as sagacious as a successor of Whittington ought to be he will answer that, on the contrary, a great benefit would have been conferred — since fair play would have been secured, and customers in search of a particular shop could find it without distracting care. But the mischief is done, and the number of Whittingtons in the Common Council being restricted, I much fear that any attempt to pull down what ougnt 63 never to have been put up v^^ould breed bad blood. Yet it surely would be possible to effect gradually what it would be inj udicious to attempt at once. The precedent set by the County Council in the matter of sky signs might be followed. Additions should not be permitted to the existing assortment. When the County Council, or the Corporation of London, at enormous charge to the community, creates some avenue or circus that might be imposing, and was at least duly chronicled on the day of its inauguration as "a noteworthy addition to thesplendour of the metropolis," it is notquite unreason- able to hope that stipulations may be made which will save the site from being at the disposal of competitive dentists, whose professional attainments dispose them to announce themselves in letters the size of an ordinary window. Respect for criticism compels me to be tedious in the array of" instances.^' Take this time a graveyard in the heart of a great town, which the exertions of the Kyrle Society, or of Lord Meath and his friends, assisted by local or corporate munificence, has rescued from neglect, and converted into a pretty garden. Some houses round have, perhaps, been acquired, and the sites added to this much desired open space. The result of the clearance is to bring into sunshine and prominence the walls and windows of other buildings, and the owners of these see their way to making a profit by letting them out to the contractors, or using them for drawing attention to their own existence. The result is, in any case, to destroy much of the picturesqueness ; to place eyesores over the little vista of green that the taste of the gardener contrives. We spend some thousands of pounds in creating the little sylvan patch, and, for want of a bye-law, allow the worst feature of the city life to dominate all. If any- one imagines that this is not a transcript from fact let the doubter go to the gardens on the Thames Embank- ment (which cost who knows how many tens of thou- sands) and observe what the directors of two Railway 64 Companies have done to add to their embellishment. The Charing Cross Station is not a thing of beauty, but it is a gratuitous and intolerable abuse that those who made it should take advantage of their own wrong, and wound the sight they have taken so little pains to please. Another sample of the subsidiary and collateral opportunities of bringing influence or constraint to bear. There is a road of small Jerryesque villas in a suburb. City clerks, all of small incomes, some nevertheless of fine taste, dwell in them. One would not take it as a type of what might be. Yet the yellow brick has toned down under the chastening touch of smoke ; the shrubs have had time to grow in the little front gardens, and in summer there is a pretty display of lilac and hawthorn and laburnum. Some of the plane trees, too, that the builder planted in the roadway when he decided on calling it Acacia Grove have survived, and give some slight air of French shadiness and dignity to the avenue. The rich merchant takes it sometimes on his way to the Railway Station, and feels that somehow it is not only cooler, but nicer than the regular route via the Pro- menade (where the "good" shops are). But there is one little gap in the row of villas. This exposes to view the end of one of them, and the enterprising per- son who has an eye for suitable positions has not over- looked so obvious an opportunity. Therefore our poor clerk and our rich merchant have to run (with closed eyes if they can) the gauntlet of much superfluous and highly coloured information as to the relative newsiness of'daily papers, the lustre of blacklead, and the limpidity of washing blue. This cause of suffering — for the pain grows by repeti- tion — might have been obviated in a dozen ways, be- ginning with the discretion of the original lessor of the ground and ending with the directly repressive action of the Local Board. The use of a Local Association would be to bring later, if not sooner, one or other of the 65 remedial forces into play. It is hardly necessary to add that the considerations which apply to this case apply also to the pretty village church and its neighbourhood, to the bridge that crosses the stream, to the Elizabethan inn on the old coach road. Had they been laid to heart by even a few lovers of the picturesque twenty years ago, such a town as Edgeware would be now what it might be, and not, alas ! alas ! what it has been made. " But what would you do with the bare wall ? " says the interrogator, the fear of whose insistence has driven me through this wearying catalogue of actualities and possibilities ? " Surely nothing can add to the deformity of a bare wall." I answer, "There would be nothing positively repulsive in mere bricks. Walls indeed (as Mr. Ruskin has taught many of us to see) may in themselves be pleasant objects to the sight, and some who are not aesthetic prigs have found an old park rampart no bad companion for some miles of road. Railway cuttings may be monotonous, but they are not distressing. But in the particular case we have been discussing I should, had I lived in Acacia Grove and been consulted, have recommended a fast-growing ivy, a few Banksian roses, and (if the total sum available for capital expenditure amounted to five shillings) a clematis or two. Even the man who shudders at bareness might have something to look at in the lapse of time.'' Let us pass to another illustrative case. There is a sequestered cove on the bleak Cornish coast. Wooded slopes, rising to the waste moorland above, close in the little bay. Where the tiny valley through which the brook descends opens out as a shore there stands a cluster of cottages. They have no great loveliness in themselves, but there is a grim solidity about the massive walls which have protected many a generation of fishing folk from the storms of winter, and when in summer the sun beats upon the flights of stone steps, and the glistening fish scales and dark nets on one 66 side, and plunges the other in sharp black shadow, and the little mermaids in gay frocks chase each other in and out from the biightness to the gloom, the contrast of strength and colour is such as Herodotus may have felt — though he does not record his medita- tions — when he wandered in Egyptian Thebes. Follow the stream as it comes rushing down, now in tiny cataracts and now forming calm pools, and you will be back once more in truest English woodland, and be lulled by the song of innumerable birds. As yet no railway has approached the spot, but though for many a year the secret of its existence was kept jealously guarded by the few who made it their refuge from the outer world, it has of late been mentioned in the guide books. Indeed, on a comparatively level space towards one of the horns of the bay, the signs of settlement are clearly visible. There are some new houses, not dainty, but plain and unpretending, and, therefore, harmless. One of these calls itseU a hotel, the birth of "inns" having apparently ceased in our enlightened times. The earlier race of pilgrims to the sjK)t lament, of course, the tokens of development. The owners of the soil and the villagers do not share their regret. The change means rent to one — employment to the other. Neither are to be blamed. Sleepy Hollow, the schoolmaster has been heard to say, is waking up, and the owner of the hotel (who has lately been to ilfracombe) has dreams of a great future. 1 for my part am enough of a Philis- tine to rejoice at the tendency which is destroying the romantic isolation of these primitive nooks. I am heartily glad that the instinct of the commonplace young man takes him to the sea-side, even though when he gets there he spends most of his time listening to comic songs with banjo accompaniments in the Great Swiss Dining Hall, and it is to me a good sign that there is this constant searching out of " less frequented " places. The first visitors — the pioneers of the invasion — are, it is needless to say, lovers of the 67 quiet picturesque. They wish to escape from the barbarities of the popular resorts ; but, alas ! in their train will come the crowd from which they fly. And then? If history, absolutely uniform hitherto, repeats itself, our pleasant Cornish retreat will in a decade be very much the same as other seats of habitation that flourish by letting lodgings. If, that is to say, there be no deliberate arrangement for conserving beauty (as far as ordinarv convenience permits), and of excludino; superfluous defacements, there will be a wanton growth of evil. Schemes there are. There is talk already of a branch line. Plans have been prepared for systematic building, with the proper complement of esplanade, squares, site for a church, for public houses, and ap- proaches to a pier. The owners of the great houses in the neighbourhood — those of them who are not lords of the soil round the bay — rail at fate and groan at the inevitable influx of vulgarity. The present writer sympathises with the sorrows, but desires to rebuke the despair. It is, he contends, every one's interest and every one's duty to take timely steps to reconcile growth with such a measure of grace as conditions permit. Now is the favourable moment for founding the Local Association, and enrolling as members those who will by-and-by be the fathers of the municipality. Contrive, as may be done with ease by a small com- mittee (including of course the progressive school- master), so to arrange the roads that the buildings will do the least harm to the aspect. Make sure that good view points are reserved as the property of the commune. Do not forget, in your anxiety to have an asphalted terrace for the bath chairs, to secure a net- work of footpaths. Plant the trees before the " villas " are built. Above all things, adopt as an inexorable rule that no advertisement boards shall be affixed to any building, whether that building be a school or hotel or lodging-house. In granting the concession for the pier make it an imperative condition that the fabric shall not be used for anything but the strict objects of a pier. Settle once for all that no one shall be allowed to display announcements of any kind save in such places and in such manner as the collective authority shall sanction, and exercise the power of control with a rigid regard for propriety of aspect. No one will be injured. '1 he shopkeepers collectively will do exactly the same amount of business as they would if they competed in making the place hideous. It must be a matter of pure indifference to them whether a Lancashire or a London soap boiler loses the chance of puffing his stuff". 1 put it, as a matter of pure business advantage, to any expert in development whether a town which, from the first, was subject to these salutary influences would not — from the standpoint of mere profit making— have an immense advantage over one in which individual caprice, or greed, or stupidity was allowed to run liot. It would be an object lesson to every visitor; thousands who had never perceived A'hy it was that " popularity '* ruined picturesqueness would become aware of the reason why. Repose, the absence of aflfront, is the most valuable of all elements in promoting attractive- ness. I cannot, indeed, guarantee that the monopoly which for the time being it is in the power of an infant tourist resort to secure would be permanent, for, thanks to the force of rivalry, the example would spread, and when propriety became the rule no sane shop-keeping community would relapse into higgledy-piggledy and pandemonium. j What holds good of our Cornish village would, mutatis rrmtavdis, apply to a new suburban district. I have often wondered why, in the eagerness to secure some fresh outlets for capital and enterprise, it has never occurred to some rich man to start a settle- ment of Rest within reasonable travelling distance of the Eank of England. 1 he railway company would be indenmified — it the prospect of traffic weie not sufficient to open the eyes of the Directors to their own palpable interest — for foregoing the profits resulting from the defacement of their stations. The waiting room would be a room in which it was possible to find rest. The station itself would be a building of some little dignity. Immediately round it would be, as in France and Italy, a garden, instead of, as in our Free England, an in- coherent jumble of sheds, placards on gigantic props, and jerry-built houses, to which the enterprise of the bill-poster and enamelled plate-maker has added fac- titious horrors. The shops would be massed in con- venient quarters contiguous to the main avenues, which would be flanked with trees and green borders instead of plate glass. The houses in which people with smaller means lived would differ in scale and sumptuousness from those occupied by those of larger means ; but as to the general eflect, the roads would be as well kept and as graciously fringed with the verdure and bloom of garden plots. 'I'he man who would invest his money in such an enterprise as this would enjoy an increment not quite "unearned/' and he would have a reward — not assessable uniier the Income Tax Act — in the conscious- ness of having set a great and fruitful example. Yet, in the present tone of what is called in the city " British enterprise," I have no very confident hope of seeing this field exploited. Millions will be lost or squandered in the attempt to extract dividends from souie sordid El Dorado in the Kalahari waste, but to create an Earthly Paradise at home is dismissed as a crotchet quite unworthy of the notice of financiers. A last exauiple. Tlianks partly to the Commons Preservation Society, partly to the enthusiasm of some residents, partly to the goodwill of the Lord of the Manor, a great expanse of breezy moorland was saved a generation since for the enjoyment, to all time, of the people of a huge city. At one end is the old village green, lined on three of its sides mth stately or pic- turesque houses, of which none that are old are without 70 historical associations. Beyond the green the plain opens out, sinking on one hand into a valley through which passes the oldest road in Britain. Beyond the vallev a Royal park slopes upwards, lorniing heights clothed with antique forest. To close in the valley are at both ends the long line of distant hills. It is a pros- pect of almost perfect rural loveliness, and may be found by diligent inquiry within ten miles of Charing Cross. The management of the common— or rather cluster of commons — is vested by Act of Parliament in Conserva- tors, who levy a rate for its n)aintenance upon the property in the immediate neighbouihood. Some years ago there was a proposal to bring a railway through the valley. The piojcct was defeated by a revival of the public spirit by which in the first instance the doom of enclosure was averted. So far well. We see what can be done by local organization when something large and definite is in question. Also the honest chronicler has little but praise for the successive conservators. They have planted woods which are now regions of delight; they have been well disposed to the golfers and considerate to cricket and football. 1 hey have drained some Serbonian bogs, and created sheets of water where it is possible to swim in summer and skate in winter. 1 hey are not careless of wild birds, or indif- ferent to the specific beetles. Everything, in short, that can be done by general directions and by arrange- ments of routine has been done, and even in small matters they receive suggestions with much benignity. But for all that there is to the eye of afl'ection a want of loving care in things small in scale, yet of much moment in their bearing on picturesque completeness. "Where it is a matter of planting a thousand trees accoidiug to the approved practice of forestry, the thing is done in a minute by resolution. But where a little clump would relieve the harsh angle of the new lake it remains indefinitely undone. When (as has happened, and will happen again) a great mansion is built which 71 catches the eye unpleasantly, no step is taken in time to provide the softening screen of foliage. Chance does much, but sometimes, like the conservators, it cannot be depended on. Then from time to time occur changes which affect the aspect. Rightly considered, no ques- tion of improvement can be half so important as the appropriate repair of the old buildings which form the most charming features in the landscape. The farm house that dates from long before the mythical age of Queen Anne ; the ancient imi where in the last century all the duelling parties had their rendezvous — is it to be thought of without pain that the old red tiles on one of the outhouses of these should be replaced by corru- gated iron? Yet the farmer thinks of economy first of all, and the conservators cannot be expected to interpose, since the due discharge of ordinary m nis- terial duties is already a sufficient burden on their patriotic energies. Imagine now that there is a local association whose special function it is to have regard to the delicacies and refinements of public pros- pects, how easily all interests may be reconciled. It would provide — in no niggard spirit — the difference be- tween the cost of deforming and conserving repair. The mere approaches to the tenant on the subject would rouse that good man and his wife to the sense that their abode was something to be regarded and to be proud of, and their lads and lasses woidd learn from the talk at the tea-table that beauty was an element in a recognized ideal of well-being; and that human life meant some- thing besides "getting on'' in the sense of money earnings. Besides these smaller demands on the solici- tude of a local society, there woidd be more considerable tasks — the restoration of the windmill, shall we say ? — should the sails be condemned as unsafe. Here, again, the "Standing Committee'' for the Protection of the Picturesque would be available at once to get together the necessary funds from the wealthy or — not always the same thing — the munificent residents. 72 But candour must add that the estimable conser- vators who do so much excellently well — leave some- thing undone that it were well to do, and do something that it were well to leave undone. It is understood that there is in their pay a corps of veterans who are unceas- ingly struggling to clear away the torn newspapers, the broken bottles, the crownless hats, the toeless boots. But the enemy remains in possession of the field, some- times as stragglers, too often in force. Far be it from my purpose to propose any solution of the mystery how these things come and why they do not go. But with all diffidence, I hold that it is not beyond the scope of human effort to prevent the accumulation : to arrange that the debris of picnics shall not be the unfailing ornament of every grove, and that the furze bushes shall not wear the livery of coloured broad sheets. 'Phe secret is to put on more old men : incidentally simplify- ing one of the problems with which our local branch of the Charity Organization Society has to deal. Further, the provision of unobtrusive boxes close to the cricket grounds and the favourite haunts of the al fresco banqueters, for the reception of orange peel and the wrappings of the viands, would make virtue more easy for those who now succumb to overmastering tempta- tion. Nor, since most of the members of our imaginary society would be subscribers also to the village schools, would it be quite vain to hope that, as a part of the moral training — as a concrete illustration of duty to one^s neighbour — the heinousness of casting the greasy lunch papers to the winds, of using newly-planted trees as climbing posts, and of other favourite enormities of the young, should be steadfastly inculcated. I conclude with the things which the conservators (as it seems to some) do amiss. This little book has for its theme The Age of Disfigurement. It would be more scientific to call it The Age of Labelling. " Cogito : Ergo sum^'' was a good enough maxim once. 1 he modern equivalent is '' 1 am : therefore I announce the 73 fact in large capital letters." No public body respects itself till it has stuck up a forest of notice boards, as symbols of its sovereignty, throughout its domain. Here I am concerned only with the shape in which the disease has attacked the worthy guardians of the sample common. There are entrances to it from many different direc- tions ; and some of the most charming of these approaches have been selected as theatres for the dis- play of huge printed proclamations. The matter is, as a rule, illegible, because obliterated by the weather. But, in any case, it would remain unread. "The British fleet you cannot see, for ^tis not yet in sight." Official dignity demanded a high post, and the result is that the edifying regulations could, under the most favourable circumstances, be deciphered only with the aid of a telescope. But not one visitor in ten thousand would dream of reading them. The only reason they exist is that the personage who had them reared was under an impression it was officially correct to have such things about. One picturesque spot is reserved for carpet-beating. I do not complain — it is the recognition of an ancient privilege, and — save in the season of spring cleaning — the frames can be construed as a cluster of gallows, with appropriate reminiscences of departed highwaymen. But, by way of embellishment, there is a notice up to say that here, and only here, may the banging of Brussels and Kidderminster be lawfully performed. That is, the notification of the rule is made onlv for the information of those who already are aware of it, and are, in fact, conforming to it. The utility generally of these notice boards is con- fined to marring the picturesque effect just at the place and time when the jar is most keenly felt. There is hardly an open space round London of which the grace is not most seriously diminished by these purposeless erections. I suppose the curators (or the permanent 74 official who has put them up in honour of the Divinity of his caste, Estabhshed Usage) would, if pressed on the matter, refer to some legal consideration as his warrant. You cannot prove a breach of the bye-laws, he would urge, unless they are on view. Well, as it would be a long business to revise the Statute Book, the local societies might be content to compromise. Reduce the height of the boards, and in each place make one serve for all purposes. Existing custom appears to demand three or four of diflerent heights, shapes, and colours, and in varying stages of dilapidation. Make the in- scriptions in which all the necessary protestations and warnings are combined the base of a pedestal ; and on the top put a map of the immediate neighbourhood, duly adjusted to show the points of the compass. On this map mark the precise spot where the observer is stand- ing. Then, indeed, it will be a monument of good counsel, and many a bewildered wayfarer will bless the kindly friend that put him on the right track. There are admirable societies in France and Germany which undertake to provide finger-posts in regions beloved by the pedestrian. But I think that those who have trusted too fondly to such guidance will appreciate the less obtrusive but infinitely less misleading method I have sketched. Need I add that country roads come within the scope of these remarks as distinctly as "open spaces'^ or forest tracts. It will be allowed, 1 trust, that in the several activities indicated — especially those of modest scale — is work which may be done by little companies of men and women who care for neatness and beauty (when that is within their reach), who love their kind, and do not despair of humanity, without noise, without conflict, and, it may be, not wholly without the sweet applause of honest thanks. It is to them we must look as the active agents in the long labour that lies before us. Every organ gains strength by being called into play, and the more closely and earnestly the Local Associa- 75 tions devote themselves to " bringing beauty home/' the greater will be their influence for procuring the abate- ment of palpable disfigurements. Those who have had the patience to follow me thus far will have perceived that I assume the general exis- tence of at least a rudimentary love of grace and order, and that I assert very strongly the need and the feasi- bility of developing it. The special phase of disfigurement with which the National Society is primarily concerned would never have been permitted to grow to its present dimensions if the defensive forces had been organized. Many have suffered, have inwardly groaned under the wrong, but have imagined themselves powerless just because, for want of faith in their fellows, they have remained isolated. We have now to undo what has been done, by the aid of those instincts which might have been marshalled to prevent the evil. To this end we have to rouse to genuine life the senti- ment of local patriotism — to get people to feel a pride and love for the place that is their home. The loose and fluctuating character of modern society may make the effort appear formidable; but there is no reason at all why the sense of honourable obligation should not in this, as in other things, shape itself to the altered conditions. There never was a time when the units of which the nation is made up were so thoroughly in earnest about the future of the social aggregate. Why should it not be a matter in the strictest sense of conscience and of religion to see that our children and children's children shall not — so far as it depends on us, the men of to-day — be doomed to live in ignoble surroundings any more than to grow up with cramped intelligence or ill-nourished limbs ? The impulse to do right is there ; we have only to enlarge the sphere in which it should operate. Much has been said of late in defence of Greek studies. Our country needs a fuller infusion of the Greek Spirit. The Glory of Athens was the love of the citizen for his State : a State not as 76 accounted for in census returns or statistics of exports and imports, or even estimates of average incomes. The State was a visible thing — it was the people and the land in which they dwelt. The Acropolis whs the holy place of filial devotion. Athene was the guardian god- dess of the fair city, because she was the guardian of the arts that made it fair ; and we may be sure that those who reared the Parthenon — that most j^erfect gem of architecture, in theloveliest setting of sea and mountains and verdant plains — did not dishonour divinity by forget- ting what was due to the dignity of Home. The splendour may have been lavished on the fanes, but there was nothing mean and sordid in the simplicity of the houses of the common folk. There were in ancient days, no doubt, notifications on the walls announcing elections, games, and so forth; but there was nothing on the "Long Walls" that could ruffle the repose of the peripatetic philosophers. It would be so in England to-day if the mechanical facilities for reproducing and the blind struggles of a complex society had not pre- sented temptation. We have to invoke the Spirit of "Progress" to heal the ills that "Progress" has wrought. In our political ideals we have nothing to be ashamed of. Selfishness, cupidity, the rancour and folly of faction : these disturbed the even course of public counsel at the gates of the Temple of Theseus, as well as over tfie Chapel of St. Stephen's. But we have still to add to the instinct of brotherhood a loving reverence for the very face and features of the Mother- land. We may not imagine nymphs in the woodland or tributary divinities at the sources of the sacred streams. But let us rerert to Nature-worship, in holding that there is profanation in wanton defacement, and piety in preserving the simple freshness of the vdlage green. The sense of solidarity and sympathy engendered by the estal)lishment of a National organization would have a stimulating effect in this direction. Many sen- 77 sitive souls shrink at present from complaining. They imagine that they are exceptions to the general rule of content. They suspect themselves of eccentricity and stifle protest as selfish. But when they become aware that many feel as they do, that the removal of the cause of their distress would be distinctly a public good, they would deem it incumbent on them to utter the thoughts that erewhile they had suppressed. I have to consider here some doubts that have been hinted as to the wisdom of any plan which assumes the existence of any common standard of taste. Taste, it is urged, is purely sui)jective. Nothing is intrinsi- cally beautiful; nothing is intrinsically ugly; it is all in the eyes of the observer. I grant this, of course. I know that if we are to be guided by scientific charity no one ought to speak of "bad^' taste and "good" taste, but of "differing" tastes. Nor for my present purpose have T the smallest objection to use such colour- less terms as likes and dislikes. I say then that there is, as a matter of everyday observation, a standard of likes and dislikes so nearly general as to be easily enforce- able; and in contemplating the work before either the Local Associations or the National Society we need not go beyond this well understood criterion. I find as a rule that it is those who are themselves fastidious (those, that is to say, whose range of likings differs seriously from that of the bulk of their fellows) who are most disposed to give taste up altogether as a bad job. I want to speak to them in their own language. Some special style, some particular effect pleases them greatly; or, it may be, is singularly displeasing; and they are aware that both in approving and in dis- approving they have few to sympathize with them ; and so when they hear of some proposal which aims at diminishing the causes of aesthetic pain or promoting aesthetic delight, they cry out in scorn. ''What is the use," they exclaim, "of making a Local Board the guardian of amenities when it includes men whose 78 perceptions I cannot trust ? They may destroy what I love or create what I detest." I cannot help saying that there is some little dash of intolerance in this specious protest against control. To the end of time judgments will diHer in the domain of art, and — if I may be permitted to coin a convenient barbarism — of " ocular satisfaction." If it were proposed to establish an Inquisition of the Fine Arts, an Index Expurga- torious of heterodox works, a Dictatorship for dog- matic embellishment, I could understand the objection. But nothing of the kind is dreamt (^f. We want only to diminish the supply of things which hardly anyone regards as anything but blots ; we want to give fair play to things that nearly everyone agrees in liking. In the National Gallery there are subjects and masters which have very unequal attractions for different classes of visitors; there are indeed many highly respectable citizens to whom no canvas in the whole collection would afford the slightest entertainment. Yet there would, I suppose, be a consensus of opinion that it would be an ill deed to paste a play bill over a Turner or hammer a direction plate on a Crivelli. So, though every public building that is put up is sure to be abused, no one would seriously contend that our state departments should be permanently housed in shanties. Out of every hundred visitors to St. James's Park probably ninety-five would pronounce it a reproach to our civilization that such a pile as Hankey's Buildings should have been permitted to overtop the Abbey. Not one, surely, would have any hesitation in pronouncing the one unsightly and the other gracious. St. Paul's Cathedral has to the eyes of a yokel a beauty and a dignity which he would fail to find in the gayest booth at a fair. As with the craft of man, so with the gifts of nature. Listen to the conversation in a smok- ing compartment between London and Dover, and you will hardly dispute the existence of a general perception that rural Kent is more pleasing than 79 one of the growing suburban districts, and that this in turn is better than — a station interior. River scenes, woodland, mountains, the sea and shore have their special votaries, but there is substantial agreement that there is Charm in the aspect of the world away from human resort. The capacity for enjoying waterfalls is a somewhat variable quantity, but it may be accepted as an axiom of taste that waterfalls are beautiful. Again, though judgments differ as to whether the plinths on the Thames Embankment are to be commended as features in the design, no member of the late Metro- politan Board of VVorks or of the present County Council would maintain, as an abstract proposition, that a stump of gas pipe, which for some ten years past has projected from the centre of many of them, is a suitable detail. No one advises that corporations or even voluntary associations should presume to trespass into the debatable ground ; but there is a strong feeling that the time has come when authority shall intervene to reconcile with the other uses ot life, the survival of elements of pleasure to which few can be indifferent. Those who predict that municipalities will make existence intolerable by insist- ing on meddling in every detail, may be referred to the other order of pessimists, who say that elected repre- sentatives are too liopelessly Philistine and apathetic to think of anything but paving, drainage, and the striking of the rate. The more probable view is that corporate action in the future will follow the line of corporate action in the past. It has given us parks, picture galler es, museums, open spaces: when armed with authority to restrain as well as to create, it may be trusted, without vexatious interference with private enterprise, to give effect to the demands of average opinion. The propaganda in which both our National Society and the Local Associations will be engaged would be manifold in its forms. Every time our Bills or amend- 80 ments are discussed in Parliament we shall be rousing an interest in fresh audiences. We shall visit the Workmen's Clubs, where we are sure of finding well- disposed hearers. We shall hold parley with bill- posting firms and the shopkeepers, and convince them that we are not unreasonable, and that a modus vivendi may be established by which they would not seriously lose and we should greatly gain. Even where we fail to awaken artistic sentiment, we shall try to touch that most responsive string in British character — the love of respectability. Every self-respecting housewife keeps the doorstep jealously scrubbed and whitened. Why should not the etiquette of common life make the exhibition of puffing plates a discredit ? Public opinion, we know, enforces a certain standard of decent behaviour in the streets. We have only to extend the range of popular ethics to house-fronts. Hotel syndicates in "Tourist" districts may be appealed to with confidence to join in protecting from defacement the beauty that brings them custom ; and (as has been remarked before) everyone who lives by letting rooms that have a pretty outlook will be a natural ally. It may — who knows? — become the Fashion to be down on Defacement. The mysterious influence which has taught half our polite population to shake hands at an elevation above the sea quite a foot higher than was at first comfortable, might prevail on rank and beauty to acknowledge that scenery, like other good things, is worth attention and respect, and that there may be vulgarity in the tolerance of Disfigurement as well as in the creation of it. The sentiment of patriotism might usefully be invoked. We used to be proud of the aspect of merry England. Now we can but hang our heads for very shame. At one time 1 solaced myself (on the assurance of travelled friends) that things were worse in the United States. A remark made by an American in an underground rail- 81 way carriage chastened and corrected me. " What a people these English are for advertising," he remarked to the ladies of his party, as the train pulled up at Victoria. Even a director would have felt mortified at the sneer. T am not sure that we may not, with a good con- science, enlist the doctors as propagandists. Certain forms of diseases are admittedly connected with the worry, bustle, and nervous excitement of modern life. A faithful analysis of the elements which make the daily round distressing would, assuredly, assign no small part to the bewildering glare and incessant assault upon the temper through the eye. The oculist, especially, would have valuable testimony to give about the effect of vivid, recurring im})ressions on the brain. Danger to life and limb would thus be supplemented by danger to sight and intellect. The line plainly can hardly be drawn at posters and at hoardings, since the use made of private premises is often more distressing than the shows on the con- tractor's stands; and it must be remembered that to reduce the scope of hoarding enterprise will set a premium on house-fronts and window space. I know of a delightful bit of Essex where (from what was once the most tempting standpoint) the eye is now caught, and held and tortured by the word "Billiards" inscribed in colossal letters of staring white on the roof of a long line of slates belonging to an otherwise romantic inn. As an enticement to the game the inscription is utterly useless. The owner had the work executed probably because he had '' seen it done " else- where. The extent to which restraint will be carried will depend on our own success in obtaining influence, and in many places there should be no insuperable difficulty in secur- ing a regulation (for example) to the effect that in a business street there shall be no display above, say, the second floor ; that the letters shall be kept within fixed G 82 dimensions; that there shall be no obtrusive emblems or hieroglyphs without express sanction. No one will hint that it would be "unpopular" in a pro- fessional or residential quarter to forbid announcements inconsistent with its general character. The effect would be decidedly to raise " letting values." On this head of the subject I have consulted one entitled to the highest respect as a Philistine and an authority in Utilitarian Ethics. His rescript is to the effect that if persons who are foolish enough to live in what they delude themselves into believing is, by reason of trees, gardens, and unadorned house fronts, a nice road, then, on the principle of securing the maximum happiness (even though it rest upon a basis of ridiculous rus-in- urbe-ism), it is proper to restrain an individual house- holder from destroying the illusion by introducing anything gravely out of keeping with the general tone of the road. The simple fact that there is in existence an authority which can be appealed to, will take the sting out of the sorrow which so many of us feel. We can bear a good deal when we know that the torment cannot be carried to indefinite lengths ; we can resign ourselves to the loss of much when we feel that there is a way of saving what remains. The sense of helplessness is the worst part of pain. As to hoardings, few can be so enamoured of posters as to complain if no permanent stations were allowed. On the other hand, most of those who love them not are sufficiently opportunists to admit that since there must be temporary erections they might, subject to regulation as to size, number, and duration, be placed at the disposal of those who seek publicity. Some of us would prefer the bare boards, but there is a general consensus of opinion that, human nature being what it is, has been, and will to the end of the chapter be, the world cannot wholly dispense with the emblazonry of printer's ink. The London 83 County Council has anticipated the suggestion that there should be rigid limits as to height, but there should be vigilance and reserve in granting licenses to exhibit posters at all. Nearly everyone, I think, holds it to be a scandal that the vicinity of Fulhain Church and Palace and the 'graceful bridge over the Thames should be converted, as it novi^ is, into an inferno of glaring bills. To many eyes the most exasperating part of these displays is the protruding piece at the top by v^'hich the contractors proclaim (in emerald green or jaundiced yellow) that they are the persons who have done the deed. Similarly the conversion of the approaches to rail- way stations into hideous panoramas of enamelled plates and painted boards cries out for stern measures. The mild-spoken irianagers of puffing concerns, who tell us that the thing really needed is to make advertise- ments artistic, are mainly responsible for these instru- ments of pure torture. Let them show their good faith by removing them. Nothing is more idle and irritating than the evasive cant about the "quality" of the designs. If every member of the Royal Academy were to put his services at the disposal of the more notorious adver- tisers they would still continue to use most largely the forms that are meant to pain. The National Society, it is needless to remark, desires by all means to "elevate the type," and it will most effectually do so when it secures fair play for what is graceful by reducing the opportunities of employing what is vile. The erections in fields should not be allowed a moment's law. They are an abomination to everyone. The persons who have put them up will plead, no doubt, that in these days of agricultural depression, the poor struggling farmer ought not to be deprived of the extra shillings he earns by lending himself and his field to the powers of evil. I believe the same defence has been set up for those who send diseased meat to market. The juries have not admitted its force. It 84 would be more manly to take at once to highway robbery. Yet we owe no small debt to the gentle- men who have been busy in placing these stations on the Railway Pilgrim's Way from Oxford (and every- where else) to London. They have provided a rediictio ad alsiirdvvi of the doctrine that "a man may do what he likes with his own." The deviser of sky signs gave the signal for revolt : to the specialist in field placards we are indebted for the final provocation that ensures the triumjih of the Revolution.* The spirit of compromise will settle the vexed ques- tion of station interiors. No one is likely to overlook the fact that the companies derive a handsome revenue from letting out their walls^ just as the profits from the hoardings is taken into account in ordinary build- ing contracts. Respect for equity will not permit us to confiscate a property which the laches of the public has permitted to come into being. But there seems no reason whv in new concessions there should not be stringent restrictions. Directors are proverbially short- sighted, and it will require a little piactical experience to convince them that it is to their own interest to accept w holesome lin)itations. Half the opposition they encounter when they want to invade a new district is due to the unnecessary ugliness and defacement which they bring in their train. What they lose in wall rents they would save in Parliamentary expenses. The Central Society will help them by securing the proper provisions in all future Bills. It is no part of the legitimate trade of a Railway to keep advertising gallerits. In other respects they are under an cbligation to keep their pre- mises in a reasonably decent condition, and to afford a prescribed amount of accommodation at the stations. All that we have to do is to give logical effect to the principles governing these monopolies. I have ex- * Readers who may be disposed to suspect that the writer unduly shirks detail as to the provisions for regulating exposed advertisements are requested to refer to Appendix C. 86 pressed my dissent from the doctrine that a terminus is intrinsically hideous, though the Companies contrive to give a colour to the delusion. Many stations in France are pleasant enough, and there are few roadside stations in England v^hich might not be either harmless or pretty if the management did not prefer to make them offensive. There can be no toleration for the practice of sticking the hateful things on the palmgs of country stations as a background to the shrubs in the porter's pretty garden patch, and as a foreground to the foliage on the hill-slope behind. Parliament, it must be repeated, has given the companies space for a station; it has not authorized them to create an eyesore and a nuisance in a rural neighbourhood. It would appear only fair to those who have rights and susceptibilities in the neigh- bourhood of a railway station, rural, city, or suburban, to provide that no advertisements shall be exhibited on the exterior or along platforms, or in other places where they are offensively visible from outside. For the rest, Mr, Waterhouse, Mr. Richmond, and Mr. Sumner have already suggested a via media. I beg, with all the deference due to such immobile bodies as Boards of Directors, to submit that a very trifling change of system on their part would substantially mitigate the sufferings of the sensitive passenger. It has been re- marked by Mr. Herbert Spencer, as an illustration of the survival of a traditional type, that our railway carriages are still built on the model of the old stage coach. Just in the same way, the stations are designed on the principle that was very properly adopted before the Com- panies got into the habit of earning side profits by convert- ing the walls into permanent hoardings. The architect prepares his plans just as his more fortunate prede- cessors used to do, on the assumption that a building is a building, and that its features ought to have a certain propriety. So he contrives, according to the best of his power, a due balance and variety of parts, and succeeds in rearing a structure of brick and iron which 86 is seldom without dignity, and often has an appropriate degree of grace. As a conscientious artist he makes; it is someone else's business to mar; but (faithful to an obsolete ideal) he declines to allow for the approaching doom. My proposition is that the Directors should instruct their architects to recognize facts; to devise station interiors, not with a view to their appearance on paper, but with a view to their future use. It will be humiliating, no doubt, at the first, to arrange wall spaces, not according to the canons of abstiact har- mony, but with strict relation to the intentions of the advertising contractors. Yet the devout craftsman is surely he who adapts his methods and his aims to the conditions with which he has to make his account. So, then, my Eirenicon amounts to this: that the manager of the line shall tell the designer once for all how many hundreds of square yards are to be dedicated to the placards. The duty of the architect shall be to assign for this purpose spaces, so adroitly conceived, that when they are occupied, the general effect shall be as har- monious and quiet as the nature of the case permits. I see no reason why the introduction of colour, in con- formity with structural symmetry and unity, should not be rendered comparatively pleasing. At the worst it would relieve us from the most serious part of the pain. The difficulty of discerning the name of the station, which distresses so many non-assthetic souls, would be at once removed. It should be the business of the regulating authority to define what proportion the area conceded to advertisements should bear to the total dimensions of the station, and any trespass beyond the " reserved compartments " would be prohibited under penalties. I have been taken to task for including in ihe list of remediable ills the practice — much afiected by Govern- ment Departments and Municipalities — ot painting official posts and premises in irritating tints. 1 remain obstinate in error. The reader must be lucky if he is not painfully aware of some such combination as this : 87 — A noble pile, in red brick and terra-cotta — the work of some gifted architect. On the corner a tablet in blue and white to tell the name of the street ; below the tablet a gas lamp painted buff; a notice in another tint hang- ing from the rod ; others inserted in the glass (colours various). On one side of the gas lamp a vermilion letter-pillar; on the other a realistic fire signal. Is it quite a wild idea to believe that responsible authorities may be led to perceive that considerations of " utility '' do not in reason imply a stolid disregard for appear- ances ? — that they may be persuaded io revert, for example, to the old unaggressive plates, in black and white, for the names of streets, or even to allow the architects of corner houses to make these useful details an integral part of the design. It is not neces- sary that such indications should arrest the gaze : it suffices if, when sought, they can be found. I need hardly add that the familiar pillar posts in their red livery are not in themselves open to reproach. The proposal to put some distinct impost on affixed advertisements — other than that which incidentally falls on them as an element in the rateable value of the premises to which they are attached — deserves detailed examination. It must be recognized at the outset that many notifications are of unquestionable public utility — announcements, for instance, of entertainments and auctions, and others relating to special contingencies of trade. It would be unreasonable and impolitic to drive these into the columns of the newspapers, however palatable such a course might be to the proprietors of journals. Any tax that would be worth levying would thus become a " tax on necessaries " and an " impedi- ment to business,^' and would fall under the censure of the political economist. It is to some extent an answer that the stamp duties already hamper conmiercial trans- actions, but then they are highly productive. There are no materials for forming an estimate of the fiscal effect of the suggested tax. But it may be assumed 88 that a rate which would not be very seriously deterrent would bring in quite enough to entitle it to the respect- ful consideration of a Chancellor of the Exchequer. To the proprietors of patent medicines and other nostrums advertising already forms the principal part of the " cost of production."'^ The addition of the duty on the posters would be a comparatively trifling addition to their outlay ; and so (it may be argued) one of the most objectionable forms of the evil would not be perceptibly abated. But the effect would be very marked, I think, on what may be described as the " marginal " puff" — the poster or tablet, that is to say, which it is just worth the while of the advertiser to put up. This is a large and hateful class, including most of the sporadic bills that distress the eye on palings, trees, and odd jMeces of wall. It would thus appear that the Treasury would have an adequate motive for action, and that disfigure- ment would be materially diminished. It has been objected by a very high authority on such matters that if a payment of dues to the State or to the Local Authority were added to the expenses of wall advertising those interested would seek to recoup themselves by reducing the standard of artistic excellence. With all diffidence, I would urge that it is at least as likely that the impost would operate in just the other direction. Having to advertise less — to have fewer and smaller bills — the speculators would naturally try to make them more attractive in appearance. Nor do I see very much prospect of harm in the possibility that the Chancellor of the Exchequer or the County Council (if the proceeds were devoted to local purposes) might grow fond of this convenient source of revenue and nurse the monster that it ought to starve. There will, no doubt, be an inducement to keep the impost at the level at which the total return will be * The expression is not inaccurate. What they "produce" is the impression that their stuff has marvellous therapeutic properties : what they " trade on " is popular credulity. 89 highest, and whatever the rate thus determined may be, it must tend to limit the practice. There remains, however, the risk that local representative bodies may be tempted, for the sake of profit from the impost, to be less careful in the exercise of their general power of limiting the number and extent of hoardings and other advertising stations. The balance of the general argument would appear to be in favour of levying a variable license charge for local purposes on the licensed stations according to area and position. But there is, to my mind, a serious objection on tactical grounds to pressing the policy just now. It would be a matter of baffling delicacy to define categories of advertisements which should be declared — as useful or necessary — exempt from taxation. Further, unless announcements in the nature of advertisements on business premises were brought within the scope of the impost, the plague would only be driven from one of its seats to break out where it is even more painful. Yet if there be even, all round, undiscriminating treat- ment, we shall have marshalled against us, not merely the class whose license we desire to curb, but an infinitely larger and more worthy class, with whom we have no quarrel. It is superfluous to add that the coyness of a Chancellor of the Exchequer about enter- taining new proposals for making enemies has to be con- sidered, especially when those who present them have to own that they are not moved by zeal for the public purse. Mr. John Leighton makes an excellent suggestion which would go far to meet the difficulty. He proposes a tax not on all exposed advertisements, but only those above a certain size — treating duplicates as an excess above the tax free dimensions. Some cases which lie on the debatable borders of the society's cares remain to be considered. There is no form of " eye-catching" which causes so much pain to gentle souls as the employment of sandwich men. Many who have cultivated a good-humoured tolerance 90 for the defacements of Nature or of the works of man resent the indignity herein done to humanity itself. These poor strollers represent, no doubt, the failures of the industrial struggle. They are the weakly, perhaps too often the worthless, members of the industrial aggregate, and it is easy to anticipate the plea that will be advanced by those who utilize their distress. It is a choice for them, it will be argued, between earning; a miserable, precarious pittance in this way or destitu- tion pure and simple. " Let them promenade, lest haply they come upon the rates." Anyone who knows anything of the art of agitation will see that the poor victims themselves would be marshalled to protest against any interference with their melancholy calling. It is a phase of sweating : and I own that, for myself, though I see very plainly how the system of starvation wages does perpetuate from generation to generation a class of starvation-toilers, I have never been quite satisfied with a blank policy of prohibition, which leaves the fate of the excluded to the indefinite chance of finding " something else to do." It is not enough — to my understanding — to say that the State nuist pro- vide for them, unless a way is shown by which the State can do so without creating evils greater than that which has to be redressed. I do not, therefore, urge that the sentiment of com- miseration which the aspcctof those poor fellows excites can reasonably translate itself into a veto on their em- plovment. On general grounds of public convenience there is, however, abundant warrant for regulation. In the city of London — though the Corporation cannot be charged with any want of consideration for the poor or any pedantic notions about taste — the board men are not allowed to perambulate ; and there seems no reason whv they should be permitted to add, as they undoubtedly do,' to the congestion of the more crowded thoroughfares, under the rule of the Vestries or County Council. 91 But whatever may be the decision as to the h'mitation of the practice in respect of place, there is crying need of regulation as regards mode. In the preceding pages no particular stress has been laid on the character of the designs in posters. We have been concerned rather with the general effect and the circumstances under which they amount to an affront. But when the things are brought under the very nose of the pedestrian, and reiterated in endlessly recurring files, the question of taste and morality becomes pressing; and no one will be disposed to deny that the tendency is from bad to worse. A case could be made out for interference on grounds of public health; for some of the placards which disgust the robust are admirably calculated to give a nervous shock to the delicate. If we cannot quite reform the boards, we are bound to provide against the systematic degradation of those who bear them. It is a cruel mockery to trick these decrepit veterans in the guise of warriors, to send them wearily picking their way through the rain and slush in the draggled finery of Eastern potentates. Well did the Roman poet remark that "the most grievous thing in poverty is this : that it makes a man a laughing stock." But at least there need be no artificial heightening of the humiliation. " Some man or other,'^ says Bottom in the Midsvmvier Night's Dream, " must present wall; and let him have some plaster or some loam or some rough cast about him to signify wall." "'j^he wall, methinks," remarks Theseus, later on, " being sensible, should curse again." The Bottoms of our London whole year's nightmare have substituted city mud for honest "loam," and since poor Wall dare not " curse again," the spectators of the tragic farce must see that Right is done. Homage must here be paid to an objection which is made, with unfailing regularity, to every proposal that aims at correcting an abuse. " A good many men," it is said, " get their living by making or fixing the things 92 you dislike. You must not, therefore, interfere,'^for that would deprive them of employment.'' So far as this raises the question of temporary dis- location of labour, the consideration is one to which most of us allow some weight. It would induce us (supposing there were any risk of a sudden and serious change of practice) to take steps to make the transition gradual. But we cannot flatter ourselves that our pro- test will have such early and widespread effect as to lead to distress in the bill-sticking fraternity. Even if we accomplish the utmost measure of our hopes, we shall leave these practitioners a good deal to do. The overthrow of the boards in fields and the banishment of the enamelled plates will not affect the fortunes of the artists who erected them. No doubt there will be less demand for their services in this special line after- wards. But in the two industries concerned the range of really useful and honourable employment is so wide that no workman will suffer inconvenience. They will find a more praiseworthy outlet for their honest energies. It is, therefore, hardly necessary for my immediate purpose to show that unless the forms of advertising we are speaking of add to the general well-being, they cannot claim indulgence on the mere ground that they ^' give employment." Certain groups of capitalists and workmen are engaged in making boots and shoes. These boots and shoes, when worn, add to the comfort and efficiency of others, and therefore when the mem- bers of the shoe-making trade get their share of the food, clothes, houses, books, and so forth, produced by other groups, it is a case of fair exchange by which everyone benefts. But supposing the workmen made shoes so bad that, instead of giving comfort, they caused acute pain, it would be no justification of their trade that it gave them employment. So to the extent to which bill-stickers and their masters vex us without benefiting us they are as useless as beggars, and, in- 93 deed — save as regards the honesty of their intention — are as harmful as thieves. Labourers live on things produced by labour, and when they return nothing useful to the common stock they are parasites. The adornments of public-houses have to be con- sidered. If any trade can claim a prescriptive right to assert itself in colour, it is that of the licensed victualler. When the custom of inn signs grew up it was, I suppose, as a part of the general practice in all callings. But whereas in most others it has died out, it not only survives in that of the publican, but assumes every day more monstrous proportions. Not even the rigid teetotaler has any quarrel — as far as aspect goes — with the sign in the old-fashioned sense. It is one of the most picturesque features in country towns, and along the old coach roads. The pity is that the charm of the quaint iron work and of the gay device is destroyed by the glaring horrors on the gable end or on the dead walls hard by. But the cases are rare in which an inn, however old, is allowed to remain without large additions to its peculiar blazonry. The brewers, we may suspect, are the culprits. There seems to be a keen competition between the members of this opulent brotherhood as to which shall render itself most un- pleasant to the possessor of a quiet eye. I quite admit that in this case the pain is much lessened by a tacit recognition in the mind of the observer that the thing is usual; that it is part of established practice; that it is done, if we may say so, on fixed principles, and with a sort of conscientious thoroughness. The gaudy proclamation of a starch or a wash- ing blue which assails us from between the draw- ing-room windows of the local oilman, vexes us as an impatient, irregular, haphazard excrescence on the modest brickwork. But the highly varnished in- scription, brilliant wiih gold and rainbow hues, which forms in itself an upper story for the neighbouring public-houses, and bears (as hundreds of others do in 94 the surrounding district) the legend " So and So's Entire," is somehow accepted as of the essence of the establishment of which, in truth, it forms so large a part. The psychologists if appealed to could render no doubt a satisfactory explanation of what on the surface appears to be a flagrant want of equity in our emotional judgments, but it is, I think, a fact that the boards on the orthodox brewer's public-house do not distress us as much as they ought. As a confirmed opportunist I think that this is fortunate, for beer, if not the most respect- able, is one of the most powerful of interests, and is certainly not least formidable when it is resisting some- thing that it would be its own interest to accept. If the brewers and the publicans were wise they would make haste to make licensed premises less conspicuous. But in their short-sighted zeal to snatch custom from each other by aiming at notoriety they bring their common enterprise into superfluous discredit. This is not the place to hint any opinion as to the evil or the good of alcohol, as to the expediency or possibility of diminishing drinking by prohibition or local control. But assuming that the moral repugnance with which many men and women regard the trafiic is not wholly justified by the realities of the matter, the trade, I think, has mainly itself to blame for the exaggerated dislike to it. Many a license has been opposed and refused, not so much because additional facilities were deemed likely to increase drunkenness, but because the appearance of another aggressive exterior was considered likely to lower the social tone of the locality. Therefore, while I cannot expect that local bodies will subject licensed premises to quite the same regulations in respect of "notices visible from the thoroughfare" as ordinary callings, I am not without hope that those directly interested will see the need of discreet moderation. If brewers are strong so are total ai)Stainers. " Advertisements in periodicals." "Advertisements delivered by hand." " Advertisements despatched by 96 half-penny post." '' Advertisements stuck between the pages, or bound in the substance, or printed on the covers of books." " Advertisements glued furtively on portmanteaus." " Advertisements on furniture.'^ ''Ad- vertisements as wall decorations of restaurants." " The corpus of advertising literature that forms the sole library of many hotels of the first rank." These, as the Committee of the National Society have saddest reason to know, are causes of perpetual annoyance and lively indignation to many who are not easily roused to wrath. The provocation is no doubt extreme, and growing. But it does not appear that organized eflfort is the most appropriate way of securing relief. The Society stands upon the principle that the protection of the public Sight is a public duty and a public interest. To give efTect to that principle is, we hold, an under- taking within the scope of wt-ll-directed energy; but we do not disguise from ourselves the truth that it will tax our resources to the utmost. We dare not aim at more. We cannot presume to save individuals from annoyance in the sphere of private life. But in most cases the remedy lies in the hands of those who are aggrieved. It demands no extraordinary effort to consign circulars by the sheaf to the waste-paper basket. If the readers of illustrated papers who are annoyed at finding the trade puffs inextricably inter- woven with the matter which they care to look at and to preserve for binding, would simply write to the publisher to intimate that sooner than have the paper with offensive intrusions, they will dispense with it altogether, the publisher (or his advisers) will become aware that there is a loss as well as a profit side to the advertisement account. From all I have heard, I venture to believe that even now it would be commercially remunerative in some depart- ments of serial literature to make the sensibilities of the readers, and not the reports of the advertisement can- vasser, the criterion of expediency. In the long run 96 the tradesmen who seek the custom of the cultured classes will be only too pleased to address their eyes in the form that least affronts. It is not the newspapers that print the flash announcements that obtain the highest terms for their advertising space. Conductors will go as far in the direction of vulgarity as they can without repelling absolutely the better order of readers. But they will not go farther, and, therefore, I repeat, taste and culture, if they choose to assert themselves, can determine the character of the advertising columns in publications that appeal to taste and culture for patronage. We have been urged to bring advertising noises, and noises generallv, whether purporting to be music or not, within our scheme. Most of those who feel the unpleasantness that is visible feel also the unpleasant- ness that is audible. But, for reasons already set forth, it cannot be deemed safe to comjilicate our task. The law, it is some comfort to know, has already given aggrieved residents a right to secure, at any rate, a partial respite in each separate case of assault on his nerves. An understanding among a sufficient number of householders in any given neighbourhood to exercise the right, regularly and remorselessly, would secure for the district such unpopularity with organ grinders, German bands, and singing beggars, that as a fraternity they would soon learn to shun the inhospitable region. The nuisance of steam whistles would appear to be an infliction serious enough to justify a separate Act of Parliament. Meanwhile everything gained for the com- fort of the suffering eye will help to smooth the way of the champions of the tortured ear. We must not be too severely blamed for calling our association " The National Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising." The title is long and cumbrous, and does not lend itself to abbreviation. But it has the merit of detailing fairly well our principal purposes. We object to advertisements so far as they 97 are disfiguring, and we object to them because they disfigure. Zeal against disfigurement implies, of course, a love of harmony, of order, of grace, and, in fact, as has been seen, it is part of the acknowledged aim of the society to promote, as well as to protect, picturesqueness. But many of us, perhaps most of us, regard the repression of the particular evil of jarring advertisements as our most hopeful sphere. In any case, the wider mission would be entrusted in detail to local associations. The practical ideal is not to convert this world of Britain in all its parts into a scene of beauty — for that we know may not be — but to conserve, as far as possible, what is fair, and where grace is out of the question, to exclude wanton and unnecessary uusightli- ness. The condition contemplated in the latter case is something midway between the pleasing and the repulsive, a neutral state of restfulness, neither loveli- ness nor deformity. Unfortunately the English language has no word to express this negative good. The Latin word concinnitas conveys, I believe, the ilesired sense, but we were afraid of being thought pedantic by the unlearned and inaccurate by the scholars. "Comeliness" was tentatively submitted (" The Society for the promotion of comeliness in public places"), but there were smiles, and no more was heard of the phrase. "Decency" and "propriety" are etymologically all we could have desired, but the writers on ethics have misappropriated them to their own pur- poses, and they are no longer available for common use. Had we called ourselves the Guild of Protectors of the Public Eye the College of Surgeons would have obtained an injunction. We cast about (inspired by the example of the Kyrle Society) for some eponymous hero, someone who had distinguished himself in past times by his zeal against defacements. But historical records disclosed (as might have been surmised) that till the reign of Queen Victoria there never was a crisis that called for such a deliverer. " The Vaishnava sect" would H 98 have done if the public could have been expected to know that of the three members of the Hindu triad Vishnu was " 1 he Preserver," as opposed to Siva, the destroyer. But the public is not familiar with Hindu mythology, and, besides, it would have been unwise to incur the suspicion of being theosophists. So we were reduced to the name we bear, and which we fear we must continue to bear. But if anyone not being an impenitent advertising contractor can suggest a better the society will gratefully adopt it, and elect the ingenious proposer a member on the spot. The infelicity of our title has not, at any rate, marred our fortunes. The movement is still in its beginnings, but the list of members is conclusive as to the wide" diffusion of the feeling represented by the society. The Cabinet and the County Council, the Judicial bench, the Universities and Public Schools, Science, speculative and applied, the College of Surgeons and the Royal Academy, Literature in all its branches, the great Public Departments, County Society and com- mercial enterprise contribute representatives whom the most diffident Court chamberlain must describe as eminent in their several walks. The morning papers have not overwhelmed us with attention, but the few that have spoken and the evening papers have shown much goodwill towards our aims, and subject to some reservations, thorough approval of our methods. Con- servative criticism has been as kind as Liberal or Radical, and we have reason to know that some who are very closely identified with what is, not very aptly, I think, called the Democratic movement, are most heartily on our side. In the minds of those who have stirred in this matter there has indeed been one misgiving. The wilderness of ''movements" is hardly less appalling than the array of notices in a station ot the Under- ground Railway. No humane man would lightly add another to the mass. Some will tell us, too, that 99 the time is not propitious, that now, when labour is waking to a fresh sense of its powers and its wants, when society is intent upon the problem how best the means of living can be secured to all its members, it is vain to plead for the mere comfort of the eye. " Give us bread," cry the unemployed ; " we are too hungry to care whether the outward aspect of this earth, which only gives us room to struggle, be foul or fair." None of us, I think, are indifferent to these great issues of social organization, and some of us take an active part, on one side or the other, in searching for the right solution. But we say that this is a part, and an essential part of the work that has to be done. While Socialists and Individualists, Radicals and Conservatives, New Unionists and Old are settling among themselves the better way of giving the worker a larger share of the material comforts of existence and ampler opportunities of culture, our part is to keep his world one in which rational happiness is possible, and in which taste shall be a blessing and not a curse. The rich man does not renounce all prospect of aesthetic enjoy- ment when he resigns the streets and fields to rampant Philistinism. He has his home and his pictures, his yearly holiday in tracts which as yet the advertising contractor has not annexed. When he closes his garden gate he can breathe freely. But the poor man's only travel is the daily journey from home to work and from work to home, relieved now and then with a cheap excursion. He is always in presence of the pest which makes his course its pecuHar prey. In the omnibus, in the tramway, in the compartment of the railway carriage — wherever he goes, Hampstead, Boxhill, Epping Forest — it dogs his steps. Taste, let us remem- ber, grows with wha^ it feeds on. If you want to elevate the people you must chasten their surroundings. If you wish to degrade them, leave the land still at the mercy of the defacer. But spare us at least the sage remark that it is " no use to do anything," that " the 100 masses are irredeemably vulgar in their likings." We who are joining together now for strenuous effort may fall far short of the attainment of our end. But we shall free ourselves from the reproach of having, by selfish apathy or spiritless despair, consented to the wrong. We shall have done something in our day and genera- tion to make the world a better place for those who live in it. APPENDIX. A. " The National Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising" has been formed with the pur- pose : (i) Of checking the abuse of the practice of spectacular advertising. (2) Of protecting and promoting the picturesque simplicity of rural and river scenes, and the dignity and propriety of our large towns. All persons who are in general sympathy with the objects and methods are eligible as members ; but no member is personally committed to each and every feature of the Society's scheme. The services of all the officers are to be honorary. The annual subscription is to be half-a-crovvn per annum. The measures contemplated — subject always to the result of closer examination and more mature con- sideration — include : I. Such an amendment of the existing law as would confer on local representative bodies effective control over all forms of painted or printed announcements visible from the thoroughfares or public places, and would direct them to frame reasonable regulations; the regulations framed in pursuance of these powers not being necessarily uniform over the whole area, but varying according to the special character of distinct localities. In case of breach of the regula- tions relief to be obtainable on complaint of ag- 104 grieved persons. It is impossible to lay down beforehand any hard-and-fast rule as to the degree of prohibition. There is no intention of abolishing the use of temporary hoardings as advertising stations. But, no doubt, it would be easy in many localities to secure a veto on sky signs, advertisements on chimneys and towers and parapets, hoardings and boards in fields, straggling posters and tablets on walls, gigantic hoardings, the more glaring deface- ments on town sites of particular historical or archi- tectural interest, or at picturesque rural spots ; the sort of intrusions, in short, which even the Laodicean judgment pronounces offensive. The "invasion of the country " by the defacer is felt by nearly everyone to be an outrage, and to repel it would involve the minimum of trouble and afford the maximum of relief. II. The imposition of a duty or special rate on all exposed advertisements as a form of local or imperial revenue. III. The insertion in all Bills giving legislative authority for the acquisition of land or construction of works, of provisions either prohibiting or subjecting to appropriate regulation (as the case may require) the use of any portion of the land or fabrics for advertis- ing purposes. IV. The recognition by public departments and municipal authorities that in the arrangement of official premises and appliances — for example, in the placing of signs and notices — reasonable regard should be paid to the public sense of sight. In other words, that appearance should be considered in connection with convenience. V. A common understanding that the members will each at his own discretion abstain (as far as may be) from using commodities which he personally feels are advertised in an offensive way, or patronizing estab- lishments which he regards as exceptionally un- scrupulous in advertising display. The Society dis- 105 countenances any action beyond the strict intention of this paragraph. As to organization it is proposed to have — A Central Society in London, which shall promote the necessary legislalion ; promote the formation and co-ordinate the efforts of a network of local associations, each working in detail within a defined and manageable sphere ; contribute as far as a central organization can to the formation of a healthy public sentiment on the sub- ject by the publication of pamphlets and leaflets, by representations to public bodies, by arranging con- ferences and supplying lecturers ; undertake when deemed advisable specific efforts at repression or prevention ; assist with advice and with the resources of a central representative organization those locally concerned. The local associations would exert themselves by the use of social influence and individual opportunities to exclude disfigurements, and would by the exertion of the power of the individual members as ratepayers or as municipal councillors, secure the effective local ap- plication of the powers conferred by the amended law. The members would seek to propagate a taste for comeliness, and to convince their less critical neigh- bours that it is really worth while to have sobriety and order in the aspect of a place. The associations would act in concert with all other organizations having for their end the preservation of town and country from wanton and unnecessary blemish, and for enlarging the range of popular enjoyment of the pleasing and the picturesque."^ B. The following circular may serve as an illustration of what may be done towards the formation of a Local Association for the Protection of the Picturesque : — * Fuller particulars may be obtained by written application to the Honorary Secretaries at 7, Great College Street, Westminster, S.W. 106 It is proposed to form an Association for the district of . . . with the object of preserving the picturesque features of the neighbourhood, as far as possible, from destruction or impairment, and generally of promoting grace and dignity in the aspect of the place. The Association would act in concert with the National Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising. Happily, at present its functions in this respect would, save in one or two instances, be rather preventive than remedial. It would seek to supplement the labours of the Common Conservators, and of the Local Board, in the numerous cases •where official management necessarily falls short of an ideal standard of minute care for the amenities ; but it would aim at maintaining the most cordial relations with both these bodies, and would, it is hoped, include most of the members among its own supporters. It would, as a voluntary agency, undertake functions to which the representative bodies could not usefully address themselves, and on matters falling properly within the sphere of corporate effort, would assist wiih suggestions. It would not make any pretension to being a tribunal of taste ; but would seek to secure effect for views regarding modest improvements or precautions, about which there is practically a consensus of opinion. A few examples of matters with which the Association might be invited to occupy itself at once may make the purpose in- telligible — {a) The rescue of the Windmill from its present state of decrepitude and mutilation. (<^) The diffusion of torn newspapers, old boots, empty cans, and other remains over the Common is felt to detract materially from the primitive charms of the expanse. It would be possible to combine the provision of employment for some of the aged poor, with effectual deliverance from this jarring element, (r) The upper end of the Lake is felt by many to be somewhat harsh and ungracious. A little judicious planting would, in a few years, restore the picturesque balance, (rt') There are likely to be very soon extensive building operations on the . . . Estates. It is thought that suggestions from those living in the neighbourhood, and therefore well acquainted with the opportunities for picturesque effect, would be cour- teously received by those responsible for the plans, and that 107 in this way some addition to public enjoyment of scenery may be combined with a distinct advantage to those interested in the property. Similarly, with respect to the contemplated widening of the village end of . . . Road, the Association might, without being too intrusive, have some suggestions to make. The Association would not be precluded from considering any proposals that purported to be for the improvement of the town or Common, or for reconciling the fullest enjoyment of the Common as a pleasure resort, with respect for its natural beauties and unspoilt simplicity. It might, in brief, be a permanent clearing house for many excellent schemes of a kind which from time to time are broached, but generally end in nothing for want of some steady organization, enjoying and deserving the confidence of the residents. Nor is there any reason why, when the Association is formed, it should not have separate committees for doing the work of such Societies as the Kyrle, the Selborne, the Wild Birds' Protection Society. It would not regard as visionary the idea that people generally might be encouraged to prefer what is beautiful or orderly to unsighiliness, and to feel an affectionate pride in the place that is their home. To this end it would use the time-honoured method of leaflets, lec- tures, and exhibitions. An effort to get together a loan col- lection of pictures illustrating the past and present of . . . would, it is thought, be a welcome beginning. The subscription would be balf-a-crown a year. Special subscriptions would be invited for special objects from those particularly interested. Residents desiring to join will kindly communicate with any of the undersigned. If, on the one hand, we do not presume to lay down any rigid and unvarying standard of municipal regula- tion, we must not, on the other, incur the suspicion of being unable to give any concrete expression to our views. 1 venture, therefore, to suggest tentatively the following scheme of bye-laws, not as a precise model 108 of what ought to be done, but as an example of the maximum degree of restraint that could be proposed in ordinary cases with fair prospect of acceptance. For Country Districts {ijichidivg the Railway Zone). Licenses to be granted for the exhibition of advertis- ing announcements on specified surfaces of walls or hoardings. Only licensed persons should be permitted to affix such announcements, and it should be a condition of the license that the holders should affix them with strict regard to compactness and regularity of general forms. Painted boards, enamelled plates, paper posters, and other distinct categories to be separately dis])layed. It would be a condition of the license that no in- decent or repulsive advertisements should be affixed. Penalties for breach to be recoverable on complaint of any aggrieved person — the question of indecency or re- pulsiveness to be decided, as a question of fact, by the magistrate or jury. No projections beyond the general outline to be allowed. No authorized station to exceed, say, 15ft. in height from the ground. The positions to be sanctioned with careful regard to the surroundings, the determining principle being to allow easy access within the radius of legibility, and yet to prevent the announcements from being conspicuous at distances from which the oidinary matter of bills cannot be read, and to confine them to situations where the effect is least disfiguring. Assuming that the Local Authority levies an impost, either on each station (according to the sanctioned superficies) or the separate bills, etc. (according to size), the rate of impost to be fixed from time to time with a view to discouraging excessive display. Due notice of the intention of the Local Authority to sanction any new station to be given before the 109 sanction is to have effect, in order to give those locally interested an opportunity of making representations on the subject. No advertising announcement visible from public thoroughfares (including railway lines) to be allowed in places other than the authorized stations. From this would be excepted announcements on premises relating strictly to the general business carried on therein, or the purposes for which the premises are used. But even as to these, the regulation as to "■ conspicuousness " and disfiguring effect to apply, due regard being paid to present interests. For Towns. All thoroughfares or other " areas of vision " to be grouped in classes. For the first class the rule would be prohibition of all external announcements. (I am not drafting formal rules, and, therefore, need not mention such obvious exceptions as brass door plates and cognate trifles.) The other classes would follow in descending scale, according to the diminishing stringency of the rules deemed applicable, the distin- guishing factors being: the height above the ground at which advertisements would be allowed, the size of the letters, the size of the announcement as a whole, its position on the fabric, the material and colour to be employed. Advertising announcements would mean, of course, any painted or inscribed description intended to attract notice. It will be seen that this method of classification would cover the cases of sky signs, of letters on roofs, or end walls. Advertising emblems would come within the scope of the regulations. As to hoardings and advertising stations generally, the system proposed for the country would, mutatis midandis, apply. But as the temporary exigencies of building would provide in most places all the accommo- dation that could reasonably be required, permanent stations would as a rule be prohibited. 110 The duty of classifying areas would devolve on a Committee of the Local Authority, either constituted ad hoc or dealing with kindred branches of control. There appears no necessity for a precise system of appeal, but say three months' notice should be given before the decision of the Committee should come into force, and within that period any person interested (not resi- dent ratepayers niereK) might make representations to the ConuTiittee, uhich would naturally desire to be guided by local feeling. The Committee would at all times be willing to revise the classification in the light of fuller information. Although the "areas" constituted would commonly be streets or sections of streets, the range of sight would be the determining principle. Thus the rule in its application to quays, squares, and parks would govern all structures which iorm conspicuous features in the prospect, the more stringent rule prevailing over the less stringent. For example, the regulations for the towing-path from Putney to Barnes would prohibit offensive displays on the Middlesex side; the right of Fulham Church and of l^itney Bridge to be pictui-esque would be vindicated. The overlapping of jurisdictions ought not in practice to l)e a difficutly. It will not be denied, I think, that the plan of con- trol here roughly sketched could be embodied in precise and definite regulations ; that in their application they would involve no considerations more subtle or dis- putable than a measuring tape would at once decide, and that in their interference with the discretion of mdividual owners they are not nearly as vexatious as many bye-laws now in force relating to sanitation and building, while the object aimed at would be on the surface much more obviously and immediately beneficial to the localities affected. Every paragraph of these proposals is, I am well aware, open to grave objection. I have not attempted to insert all the necessary provisos or limitations or aimed at accuracy of defini- : 111 tion. The question I submit is not whether I have been verbally exact, but whether the scheme, roughly indicated, is susceptible of being thrown into working shape. Let me add that, such as it is, it must be read in the light of the general cousiderations set forth in the body of this book. An indolent critic may, possibly, take hold of the suggestion that, in towns, areas should be classified, "the determining factors being — the height above the ground at which advertising announcements would be allowed ; the size of the letters ; the size of the announcement as a whole ; the material and colour to be employed." Armed with this excerpt he would deliver judgment in some such strain as this: — "We quite admit that many of the things we have to see in the streets go beyond the line of the permissible. But it will never do to say that Town Councillors are to dictate to every shopkeeper the mode in which he is to attract custom. 'Colour' and 'material,' indeed! No, no. English common-sense will never stand such a crude absurdity." The answer to the indolent critic, of course, is that if you want to have a flexible system you must provide for extreme cases. In London the Chief Commis- sioner of Police has power to regulate traffic ; he can (and often does) direct that between certain hours certain thoroughfares shall be closed to vehicles or pedestrians. What would be thought of the common sense of the indolent critic if he declaimed against the preposterous notion of lodging such arbitrary authority in the hands of a non-elective official ? Would he consider it eflective sarcasm to exclaim, " What? Permit a glorified constable to prescribe the routes by which a citizen is to get to his office or his house. Preposterous 1 " I ask only that the function of control I suggest shall be examined in the same spirit of reasonableness as those functions of control which already exist. There is not? 112 bye-law or set of regulations on anv subject under the sun which if perversely interpreted might not be made to appear a monument of complicated meddlesomeness. A candid inquirer will take into account the condi- tions under which they are to be applied. Local bodies will, for our purpose as for others, be delegates of the community, and will seek to conform to the prevailing wish. They are more likely to under-regulate than to over-regulate. The rule of absolute prohibition would be a counsel of perfection, though I do not suppose there would be much uproar if it were applied to Bel- grave Square, or to some less august areas in many of the semi-rural suburbs. Probably a very large part of every parish would come under the category at the other end of the scale, that, to wit, in which there is no constraint at all. As regards the intermediate classes, the regulating authority would rather wait for the expressed desires of those locally interested and respond to their wishes than force upon them a particular regime. But it must have a wide discretional power if it is to give appropriate relief where relief is sincerely wished for. The stipula- tion as to "colour" and " material " is made with a view to conjpromise, not with a view to rigid ordinance. There may, for instance, be cases where the use of open letters of gilt metal would serve the purpose of the shopkeeper and be less distressing to his fastidious neighbours than gaudily painted boards. It would not mitigate my own pangs, I confess; but from local observations, especially in Scotland, I am led to think that some conflicts of tastes have been settled on this basis. Speaking generally, the principle contended for is that areas which object to advertising disfigurements ^hall have the means of procuring their exclusion, to the extent of the objection. THE END. ') UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY BERKELEY Return to desk from which borrowed. This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. I 1 1956 ly REC*D LD FEB 19 1957 CI 5 1953 U 24Way'56Vip SEP , 1 1974 2 7 KfiC'D GKC Umi AUG 1 2 'Ji LD 21-100m-9,'48(B399sl6)476 ''■^^n'ss3'r. JAM 4 1963 ^m y?^ MW ^ m^ UBRAI^Y US U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARII CDSWTbDHSb /699s^o ■ ^-$33. 'Ef^^' THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY