One of the greatest difficulties in this expansion of the area is the means of locomotion. It is at present in the power of a railway company, which is after all only a private trading concern, to create or ruin the prosperity of a suburb by the kind of provision which it makes for it necessities. A good, rapid, cheap, and frequent service of trains is a matter of the utmost importance to a suburb. But here again, our method of expansion is left to chance and haphazard. The speculative builder does not trouble himself about a train-service; he knows by experience that he can attract a population to any given locality, and he leaves the new residents to discover the inconveniences of the locality for themselves. It might be supposed that the railway company, in its own interest, would be quick to profit by the new population on its line of route; sometimes it does so, but in many instances it does not. One would suppose by the grudging way in which extra trains are put on to meet the needs of an increased population, that the railway company was a beneficent association, granting favours, instead of a trading concern in search of new business. The only real remedy for this kind of evil is that all the means of locomotion within a twenty-five miles radius of Charing Cross should be in the hands of one central authority. If a County Council is capable of superintending a tramway system, it should also be capable of superintending the suburban railway system for the public good. And if it be thought much too vast an undertaking for the County Council to become the proprietor of all the suburban lines, it should at least be in the power of the Council to exercise effective control over their working, and to compel the companies to make adequate provision for the outlying populations.
But it is clear that if factories and businesses were removed into suburban districts, carrying their armies of workers with them, a good part of the difficulty of locomotion would soon settle itself. It is the enormous daily flow of population toward the centre that chokes the channels of locomotion, and the wisest method of checking this flow is to make it unnecessary, by establishing manufacturing colonies, on the pattern of Mr. Ellis Lever's and Mr. Cadbury's colonies at Port Sunlight and Bourneville. There would still remain the difficulty of locomotion in the central districts, but with proper enterprise, organisation, and control, this difficulty is not insuperable. In a few years we shall look back with wonder and pity to the days when the infrequent 'bus, the slow and tedious horse-tram, and the exorbitant cab were the means of locomotion in which a city of six million people put its trust. The electric tram, clean, frequent, and rapid, will be everywhere; the electric cab will run at a normal fare of threepence a mile; perhaps also there will be electric overhead railways, constructed upon a system which does not interfere with the perspective of the main thoroughfares, for the overhead electric railway, whatever may be its defects, is a means of locomotion vastly preferable to the unventilated tubes on which we now pride ourselves. May we not also hope that the general application of electric force will do much to cleanse our atmosphere? With houses lit and warmed by electricity, factories run by electric force, cooking done in electric ovens, the vile smoke which darkens and destroys the city would disappear. The skies of London would be as pure as the sky of the Orkneys, and a hundred trees and plants, which now perish at the first touch of the fog-fiend, would grow in our city parks and gardens as freely as they grow in Epping Forest. With a fleet of electric boats upon the Thames, running at one minute intervals, the Thames would once more become the river of pleasure, and a highway of popular traffic. There is no reason why these things should not be. All that is needed is that London, through its chosen representatives, should assume the full control of its own life; working out the scheme of its improvement by deliberate methods and upon a settled plan; compelling the obedience of all its citizens to a central authority, and intrusting to that authority the complete management of its affairs, not as a means of personal profit, but for the profit and the welfare of the whole community.