are very modern, but their remoteness and isolation upon the Essex marsh, the days of failure attending their creation, invested them with a romantic air.  Nothing in those days could have been more striking than the vast, empty basins, surrounded by miles of bare quays and the ranges of cargo-sheds, where two or three ships seemed lost like bewitched children in a forest of gaunt, hydraulic cranes.  One received a wonderful impression of utter abandonment, of wasted efficiency.  From the first the Tilbury Docks were very efficient and ready for their task, but they had come, perhaps, too soon into the field.  A great future lies before Tilbury Docks.  They shall never fill a long-felt want (in the sacramental phrase that is applied to railways, tunnels, newspapers, and new editions of books).  They were too early in the field.  The want shall never be felt because, free of the trammels of the tide, easy of access, magnificent and desolate, they are already there, prepared to take and keep the biggest ships that float upon the sea.  They are worthy of the oldest river port in the world.

And, truth to say, for all the criticisms flung upon the heads of the dock companies, the other docks of the Thames are no disgrace to the town with a population greater than that of some commonwealths.  The growth of London as a well-equipped port has been slow, while not unworthy of a great capital, of a great centre of distribution.  It must not be forgotten that London has not the backing of great industrial districts or great fields of natural exploitation.  In this it differs from Liverpool, from Cardiff, from Newcastle, from Glasgow; and therein the Thames differs from the Mersey, from the Tyne, from the Clyde.  It is an historical river; it is a romantic stream flowing through the centre of great affairs, and for all the criticism of the river’s administration, my contention is that its development has been worthy of its dignity.  For a long time the stream itself could accommodate quite easily the oversea and coasting traffic.  That was in the days when, in the part called the Pool, just below London Bridge, the vessels moored stem and stern in the very strength of the tide formed one solid mass like an island covered with a forest of gaunt, leafless trees; and when the trade had grown too big for the river there came the St. Katherine’s Docks and the London Docks, magnificent undertakings answering to the need of their time.  The same may be said of the other artificial lakes full of ships that go in and out upon this high road to all parts of the world.  The labour of the imperial waterway goes on from generation to generation, goes on day and night.  Nothing ever arrests its sleepless industry but the coming of a heavy fog, which clothes the teeming stream in a mantle of impenetrable stillness.

After the gradual cessation of all sound and movement on the faithful river, only the ringing of ships’ bells is heard, mysterious and muffled in the white vapour from London Bridge right down to the Nore, for miles and miles in a decrescendo tinkling, to where the estuary broadens out into the North Sea, and the anchored ships lie scattered thinly in the shrouded channels between the sand-banks of the Thames’ mouth.  Through the long and glorious tale of years of the river’s strenuous service to its people these are its only breathing times.