There is no widespread sense of citizenship in London. It exists sporadically, no doubt. The germs of it must be there, but the thing itself fell with the City walls, and passed away with the destruction of the last gate. No doubt it will grow and flourish anew, and perhaps the foundations even now are being laid on the south bank of the Thames opposite Westminster. But even in Doctor Johnson’s day the thing itself was not. Lover of London as he was—and not even Boswell had a finer gust for the great city—you find him claiming for his beloved that she was pre-eminent in learning and science, and that she possessed the best shops in the world, but he does not assert these things with the pride of a citizen. No! London to the great man is a “heaven upon earth,” and in those very words he negatives the idea of citizenship, for to be a citizen is to be a part proprietor, having a voice in the management of the concern and a responsibility for its industry and good behaviour. Citizenship means freedom and
the exercise of a franchise and the privileges belonging to a peculiar city. Pious visions of heaven give no hint of such things. And though London was and is all that Doctor Johnson claims, it is as much the property of the foreigner as of the denizen. Boswell had as great a share in it as his friend, and in truth neither had more than an equitable title to be called Londoner.
There is indeed no possibility of a citizen in London being in any real sense a compleat citizen. The pictures in his galleries, the trees and flowers in his parks, the statues in his streets, are not really his at all. In London if a new road is cut across the grass of the park a few murmurs may reach the ears of some remote official through the pages of the Press, but they cause him no uneasiness. Did such an affair awaken the indignation of the citizens of Manchester, meetings would be held, debates raised, and in the City Council the head of the official would be demanded by the malcontents, or at least a resolution moved to disallow his salary on the estimates. People who have not been citizens of any of the great towns of the North can have but little idea of the keen interest taken in municipal matters. In London day by day one scarcely reads a word in the Press of the great problems of civic administration which are so important to health and happiness. Gas and water are regarded with light-hearted contempt unless the services break down, when the simple Londoner engages in futile summer correspondence
dear to the heart of editors in want of copy. The gas and water and electricity, like the pictures and parks, are not his to manage. But the citizen of no mean city sees the great committees of his parliament fighting as to who shall serve him at least cost and at the same time make the noblest contributions towards the rates. When the New Zealander rediscovers this island and digs up the engineering works of our time to read papers about them to his historical society, he will find the great cities of the North bringing their water from the mountains of Cumberland and Wales, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham linked to Thirlmere, Vyrnwy and Rhayader; but he will have to peck about in the clay a long time before he finds any vestiges of the little troughs in which they store their water hereabouts. That Thirlmere scheme was, I think, typical of Manchester and north-country citizenship. There you had up against you the whole sentiment of the indolent holiday makers, the landed proprietors and the average man in the street who is of no city, headed by that honest prophet and champion of lost causes, John Ruskin. But citizenship was there, and citizenship won. And it is always to me one of the crosses of life that John Ruskin never had a good word for Manchester, though Manchester returned good for evil by gathering together, after he had gone, the most beautiful and thoughtful collection to illustrate his works and days. No one asserts that Manchester is the Good and the Beautiful exemplified,
but the author of “Fors Clavigera” ought to have seen a sense of beauty in a community manifesting itself in the perfection of outward and visible cleanliness, comfort and health, and a daily raising of the standard of living. The purity of life is higher in the great cities of the North than in many rural villages which look so peaceful and beautiful. Slum conditions are not unknown in the background of the garden of England, where life seems on the surface to be roses, roses, all the way. And the only antidote to all these evils that I can foresee is the growth of that spirit of citizenship which is of so little account in the South either in town or country, but which seems to be struck out of the very granite setts by the hoofs of the lurry horses when they haul the cotton bales along the Manchester streets.
And although I can only lay claim to have been a citizen by adoption, yet on one or two occasions I got whirled into the midst of a local fight, and as Yuba Bill would say, “waded in with the best.” And it was one of the curious features of Manchester that, in the very shortest period, she finds a place for the foreigner and whistles him on to her deck, and there he is pulling the ropes and working the windlass like a native born. Yiddish, German, Greek, Albanian, Turk, Spaniard, Scot, Irish, and even the intractable Celt or Silurian from remote Wales may live in Manchester and even continue to speak their native tongues, but surely and by no means slowly, they are kneaded into the citizen
mass of municipal dough, and may even be chosen as plums for the pudding or be selected as that decorative sprig of civic glory which we stick at the top of the affair and worship for twelve months as My Lord Mayor.
And a merry encounter I had with the powers that be—it is deemed an honourable thing to set the shoulders of the Corporation on the ground in a fair bout—and I recall it with greater pleasure because it was the last time I appeared as an advocate. It was my last brief, as it were, and Cerberus-like I was the solicitor, the counsel and the client—three single gentlemen rolled into one—and what was more, I won my case. And it was not, as you may be thinking, a mere police-court affair, I had not been riding my bicycle on the footpath, my dog had not strayed round the corner in undress and met a policeman—why do dogs without collars meet policemen? a mad dog never does—nor had I been watering the garden in the summer when the Corporation annually arrange to be short of water. No; as a matter of fact, I was not the defendant. I was the prosecutor, and I was prosecuting the Corporation for conspiracy to annoy certain peaceful residents of Withington, including myself. And as in this comic-opera constitution of ours when a Corporation annoys you, you arraign them before themselves, it is something to have achieved to have prosecuted a Town Council successfully before themselves, and to have found a Town Council brave and honest enough
to convict themselves and promise not to do it again.
It arose in this way. When I found that I really was a Manchester citizen and was going to live there for ever and ever, as I hoped, I made up my mind to buy a home of my own, and I settled on a corner house at the back of Withington village, bounded on one side by a narrow street called Brunswick Road, and on the other by another narrow street called Burlington Road. They were paved by setts, as all the Manchester streets are, but even the setts had a peaceful old-world aspect, and so little traffic was there over them that the grass sprang up between them, just as the history books tell us it used to do all over England before the repeal of the Corn Laws. Beyond the house were fields with potatoes in them and ponds to slide on in the winter, and there was a little stream at the end of Heaton Road, whose presiding naïad collected old domestic china in parts and left them carelessly lying on her bed. Then there was that ideal school for children at Ladybarn House, with a playground to which you could stroll and watch really great cricket matches, and marvel at the self-detachment of a young lady of eight who could field long-stop and make a surreptitious daisy chain at the same time. Once a year, indeed, there was a large but orderly crowd at the annual athletic sports. One policeman kept it in excellent order. The sport was of a high class, and you could watch a future “blue,” literally a three-year-old, romping