venient supply for another great work of that time, namely, the completing southern embankment and continuation to the lower Thames, a project which was also transformed into a like self-defraying trust. I may here further mention, that the latter trust developed, later on, into that far grander embankment and reclamation of the Thames' mouth, by which, as I have already said, through protraction of the trust into the succeeding century, hundreds of square miles were successfully added to the national territory. Not the least useful or enjoyable consequence of this great project was the bold and happy idea, so successfully realized, of diverting the river, by short direct cut, to Blackwall, instead of its old roundabout by Greenwich. The emptied river-bed, over the great space thus acquired, supplied a valley of health, recreation, and beauty to succeeding generations, and secured a blessing from millions of nursemaids and hundreds of millions of happy juveniles for centuries after.
Some of the more important features of our resanitated London may be here referred to. If the changes seemed, in some instances, extreme at the time, they were always afterwards justified by the expanding wants of the future. We reversed, of course, that old order of things, by which our streets became narrower and more twisted as we approached the central and more crowded parts of the city. The streets there became, indeed, of quite unprecedented width. But there was no great loss in that way after all, owing to the unusual height we could now give to
