The New York Rapid-transit Subway

76 DISCUSSION ON NEW YORK SUBWAY. [Minutes of Sir G. Gibt, was that in London they were not accustomed to the easy grant of those facilities which really ought to be given to enterprises sucli as tubes, and he did not know how the facilities were to be obtained. The London County Council were leaders—he would not say they were the leading sinners—in those matters ; they naturally took a prominent position in all the conflicts in Parliament, and the difficulty was to reach their hearts and soften them. He was afraid prayer would not be efficacious: it might not reach the quarter whence inspiration came. Still, it was a great pity that before tubes were commenced the County Council did not make for themselves a little tube to begin with, because probably after that experience they would have been less onerous in their demands. No doubt now, if any promoter was thinking of going into the river- steamboat business, he would find the demands were not so onerous as they were for the costly tubes. The next conclusion in the Paper had reference to the historically important question as between shallow subways and tubes. He would not venture to enter into that controversy, because it was a mere question of cost, as to which he was unable to offer an opinion. Sir John Wolfe Barry’s views he had heard before. Sir John’s argument had always seemed to him to have two fatal defects: it failed to convince two rather important interests, the people who granted powers and the people who found cash. Neither Parliament nor the promoters of railways had been convinced by the arguments that a shallow subway was better than a tube, and he confessed he was more inclined to be terrified by Mr. Mott’s £1,000,000 per mile than to be coaxed by Sir John Wolfe Barry’s estimate of a very mucli smaller figure. But it was quite clear that London people would not have tolerated on any terms whatever the construction of shallow sub- ways. He was in New York when the Subway was being made and saw the condition of the streets, with their irregular wooden floors, and the pavements blocked, and the people subjected to the most intolerable inconveniences. The English people would not have tolerated those conditions—they were an obstinate and conservative people in every walk of life. He had found them so in dealing with them as passengers. He did not know that those qualities deserted them even when they got into the position of Government con- trollers of railways. His opinion was that it was impossible to imagine Oxford Street left for a few years in the condition in whicli he saw Broadway in New York. The passion aroused by that state of things would have been so great that he would really have been afraid for the safety of the Chief Engineers; every time they passed along the work there might have been opportunities for the