It is always so in the economic affairs of a town or of a nation. Material causes are discovered to be more powerful in the middle period of their growth; once the town or nation are rooted they nourish themselves. The River of London to-day is the capital example of this truth out of all Europe. A basin far too small for modern commerce, lying much too distantly up a river too narrow for modern commercial needs, dangerous of entry for ships of modern draft, and needing perpetual and enormous labour to keep it properly open, none the less preserves its place at the head of the ports of the world. As a depôt for commerce its wharves and docks extend to Tilbury, and that system of clearing which grew up naturally on the low gravel height above London Bridge, when the pool held all the shipping of the place and was a large and secure harbour, is still established on that same hill in the shape of the banks and the exchanges of the City of London, which cancel the exchanges, not of the pool below, but of I know not what fraction of the shipping of the whole world.
There is one last point to be considered in connection with London river as a port. It has been well made by Mr. Lyde in one of his short but remarkable geographical studies. The estuary of the Thames exactly faces that great and permanent frontier line between two parts of our European culture, upon either side of which lie contrasting speeches, traditions, and even religions.
That frontier roughly divides such areas of Western Europe as have continuously preserved the traditions of the Roman Empire from outer regions to the east and to the north, which only received the Christian religion and the Roman civilisation after the breakdown of central authority exercised from the Imperial city.
The estuary of the Thames opens like a funnel just opposite the point where this frontier between what some would call the “Teutonic” and “Latin” areas, reaches the sea.
It may not be at first sight apparent why a position of this kind is of capital commercial importance. The reason is rather moral than material, though it has its material element in the cheapness and expedition of carriage by sea.
Areas which differ in the type of their culture tend to become polarised one towards the other for the purposes of exchange. Each will tend to produce something that the other lacks. Now the exchange between two such areas will, of course, proceed actively enough across innumerable points lying upon the frontier between them, but it will not penetrate very far inland, if there is in competition with the inland routes a water route. Thus Arras will exchange easily enough with, say, Aix-la-Chapelle, Metz with Trèves or Frankfort, but what of Rouen and the Baltic, Bordeaux and the Frisian Lowlands, Brittany and Vendée and the German Plain? It is evident that if no friction existed a direct sea-borne commerce along the north-western coasts of Europe would effect these exchanges; but there does exist a friction, especially in early times, consisting in the ignorance and, as it were, the credulity, separating places so far distant in mileage and, what is more important, in culture. If, then, a half-way house is found sufficiently familiar to either party, that half-way house will tend to become in this new aspect out of so many, a centre of exchange—and this is precisely what happened to London. The North Sea and the Baltic were familiar with London—but then so was the Channel and the Bay of Biscay. London river attracted in this fashion a sheaf of trade routes, drawn from the north and east, another from the south and west. And so true is this that to the present day, and in one curious slight but emphatic modern instance, you can see the process at work. Travellers intent upon no purpose of commerce but merely upon an excursion will leave London river for Boulogne and Calais, sometimes for Dieppe and Havre; other travellers will leave the same facility of egress for the Scheldt and the Rhine and the Dutch ports and the Elbe. But, unless I am mistaken, the more obvious track of a passenger steamer route between the French ports and the Belgian, Dutch, and German ones does not exist save in the case of the great liners which touch at Cherbourg. A man desiring to go from Boulogne to Flushing by sea or from some lower French port to, say, Amsterdam, would very probably find his cheapest road to lie by way of going into the Thames and out of it. We must not exaggerate this element in the present position of London, where it is but a survival and that a small one: but in the past, and particularly in the establishment of the port at the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the Middle Ages, this ‘facing’ of London River towards the great political frontier line of Europe, was of capital importance. Scandinavia, the Baltic, Frisia, and the Dutch ports had all known their way to London for centuries when the Norman Conquest, and still more the succeeding Angevin monarchy, brought round into London River a new wealth of trade from the Seine, the Loire, and the Garonne.
TWICKENHAM FERRY