Like all really serious and respectable British problems it has to be handled gently to prevent its coming to pieces in the gift.  It is safest in charge of the expert, that wonderful last gift of time.  He will talk rapidly about congestion, long-felt wants, low efficiency, economy, and get you into his building and rebuilding schemes with the minimum of doubt and head-swimming.  He is like a good Hendon pilot.  Unspecialised writers have the destructive analytical touch.  They pull the wrong levers.  So far as one can gather from the specialists on the question, there is very considerable congestion in many of the London thoroughfares, delays that seem to be avoidable occur in the delivery of goods, multitudes of empty vans cumber the streets, we have hundreds of acres of idle trucks—­there are more acres of railway sidings than of public parks in Greater London—­and our Overseas cousins find it ticklish work crossing Regent Street and Piccadilly.  Regarding life simply as an affair of getting people and things from where they are to where they appear to be wanted, this seems all very muddled and wanton.  So far it is quite easy to agree with the expert.  And some of the various and entirely incompatible schemes experts are giving us by way of a remedy, appeal very strongly to the imagination.  For example, there is the railway clearing house, which, it is suggested, should cover I do not know how many acres of what is now slumland in Shoreditch.  The position is particularly convenient for an underground connection with every main line into London.  Upon the underground level of this great building every goods train into London will run.  Its trucks and vans will be unloaded, the goods passed into lifts, which will take every parcel, large and small, at once to a huge, ingeniously contrived sorting-floor above.  There in a manner at once simple, ingenious and effective, they will be sorted and returned, either into delivery vans at the street level or to the trains emptied and now reloading on the train level.  Above and below these three floors will be extensive warehouse accommodation.  Such a scheme would not only release almost all the vast area of London now under railway yards for parks and housing, but it would give nearly every delivery van an effective load, and probably reduce the number of standing and empty vans or half-empty vans on the streets of London to a quarter or an eighth of the present number.  Mostly these are heavy horse vans, and their disappearance would greatly facilitate the conversion of the road surfaces to the hard and even texture needed for horseless traffic.