With such modestly hidden charms are contrasted a rank growth of conspicuous Institutions—schools, orphanages, “homes,” asylums, barracks, prisons and the like, thick set in certain spots, as about Sutton or Caterham. Some of these have been able to adapt stately old mansions to their use, as at Beddington and Roehampton; but more often they are modern, ungraceful, appalling, usurping, dominating landscapes thrown away on criminals or lunatics. It seems an ominous sign of the times that as often as one sees a new pile rising on Surrey heights, it is apt to turn out a lunatic asylum, for which the flats about Hanwell surely offer a fitter site. The most showy of such structures are the far seen Holloway College above Egham, and the Sanatorium for the insane in the valley below, which cost over a million, made out of the profits of notorious patent medicines, to be given back thus to the public by a benefactor who here showed himself a posthumous humorist in bricks and mortar. Or was his will made in some mood of repentance, such as led mediæval cut-throats to endow churches and chantries? His College, for which olet would make an appropriate motto, is devoted to the higher education of women, that they may teach their children to put no faith in quackery, even when disguised under the American euphemism of “proprietary articles.”
Had I had the ear of such a pious founder, I would have counselled him to leave part of his ill-got gains as a fund for prosecuting, pillorying, pelting, daubing with hatred and ridicule, whipping at the cart’s tail of public opinion, transporting to some Malebolge, foul with their own concoctions, those unspeakable humbugs, who, not content with the lower-class religious papers as an area to be defiled by their lying advertisements, impudently deface the fair scenes of Surrey with loathsome placards of this and that mischievous or worthless nostrum, to sicken the considerate passer-by at the thought of popular ignorance and credulity so easily preyed upon. Some day this mean offence may be repressed by law. Might we not begin by restricting the pill-and potion-mongers to Hackney Marsh or Barking Level as a sink for their shameless besliming? There is no spot in Surrey, not even the New Cut, Lambeth, nor the Sewage Farm of Croydon, that deserves such pollution. The endowment above invited may be vested in a body bearing the mystic device S. C. A. P. A., a league of champions sworn to slay this hideous Jabberwock, which one should not fear to mention by its legion names, for the last thing such an impostor dare do is to look twelve honest men in the face and have wrung out of him the composition of his panacea, swallowed so trustfully by the fools who enrich knaves.
Staringly mendacious advertisements are not the only scandal to raise the gorge of a poor but honest wayfarer on Surrey’s countless roads, alive with all kinds of travel, from farm-waggons to cycles, from four-horse coaches to tramps. At their London ends, the highways are cut up by
tram-lines, which threaten to go far, unless this locomotive growth be nipped by the blast of motor cars. The invasion of the motor is still a sore subject along once quieter roadsides of Surrey. How Cobbett would have blustered if, on some rural ride, he had fallen in with a modern “dead weight” hurrying out of the “Wen” at full career, on his 60 h.-p. Mercedes, a flashy show of paint and furs! But one need not have any special spite against the “jews and jobbers” who were his bêtes noirs, to be choked by indignation in the fog of dust and smoke through which one catches a hasty glimpse of bugbears in armour, masked and bandaged, like the uncanny monstrosities of Mr. Wells’ stories. It is all very well to remember how railways, too, were banned by prejudice, so that some half-century ago a liberal-minded John Bull, like the chronicler of Jorrocks and Soapey Sponge, still undertakes to apologise for those novelties on the score of their useful service to country life. But trains do not drive people off the roads and out of snug homes that lie too near the dusty triumph of Goth and Vandal chariots, “rigged with curses dark.” Far more terrible are such swift Juggernauts than the insidious speed of the cyclist, who has lived down his reproach as a “cad on castors,” being indeed kept considerate by the chance of getting the worst of it in case of collision with man or beast, whereas there can be no standing against the weighty momentum of those Bulls of Bashan, “hazing and mazing the blessed roads with the devil’s own team”—nay, the very fields, into which they scatter grit over strawberry beds and haycocks as well as hedgerows. And what one grudges most in the mad speed of the motorist is that, while he makes a moving blot on the landscape, his goggles can snatch but dim joy from prospects through which he is borne in such a whirl of excitement past one lunatic asylum to another.
Sportive sons of this tribe of Jehu have the enjoyment of an automobile race track laid down at Brooklands, near Weybridge, a sort of mechanical Epsom or Newmarket, and there has even been talk of a motor road all the way to Brighton. Did they never cast an eye on the miles of useless tunnels at Welbeck, which their present owner might be glad to have turned to some good purpose? There they could pant and fizz up and down at their own pace all day and night long in an exhilarating gleam of electric light, and smudge no fair scene flung away on their rushing course. These machines are signs of the times, when, as Horace said—or something to this effect—in days that were not so high-geared:—