Omaha Daily Bee Newspaper, September 14, 1902, Page 30

London, the Biggest City on Earth LANDING AVMERICAN CATTLE FOR ENGLISH MARKETS. (Copyright, 1902, by Frank G. Carpenter.) ONDON, Sept. 4.—(Special Corre- L gpondence of The Bee.)—~London is the center of American inva- slon. Hundreds of thousands of American doilars are pouring into it, and our capitalists hope to take millions out. It is the fattest morsel in the world's commercial larder, and thou- sands of speculative mice from every part of the earth are hungering for it. There are today 30,000 American residents in Lon- don, not including the floating population of tens of thousands more. The city has more Scotchmen than Edinburgh, more Irishmen than Dublin, more Jews than Palestine and more Roman Catholics than Rome. It has tens of thousands of Ital- lans, Germans and French and people from India, Africa and the islands of the 1 despalir of being able to give a ception of the size of London. I have been here for weeks and it grows blgger every day. The statistics show that it has more people than New York and Chicago com- bincd It Is higger than any two capltals of continental Europe, it has a greater pop- ulation than New England and it exceeds in the number of its Inhabitants many ter- ritories governed by kings, By the latest figures it has more than 6,600,000 people or about one-seventh of all the people" of Great Britaln and Ireland and one-fourth of all those who live in cities. I have gone to the top of the monument, to the top of St. Paul's and out to Hamp- stead Heath to try and get a view of the city, but at no place have I been able to see it all. It extends on and on, a vast wilderness of houses overhung by a dense smoke which shrouds the whole in an au- tumn haze and at times makes you think you are looking through spectacles of smoked glass. The smoke I8 so thick that it clogs the chimneys and in some paris of the city the chimney sweeps clean them three times a year. The city extends out for a radius of fifteen miles from Charing Cross; It embraces an area of about 700 square miles, equal to 2,800 quarter sec- tion farms, and in it there are 900,000 in- habited houses and 7,000 miles of streets and roads. Think of that and figure out what a chore it would be to explore the city on foot. If you should walk day and night, not stop- ping a minute, you cou'd not tramp through seas con- all of Loudon's streets in a year. If the strects were placed end to end, be ginning here, they would reach across Europe, making a paved walk walled with housee over France, Germany and Russla, across the Ural mountains and the high- lands of Thibet and clear through China to the Pacific ocean. All the way you would find the streets well paved, and some of them the smooth-st, hardest and best streets of the world. You would find many grand buildings and tens of thousands of dirty little two and three-story blocks, packed with London's poor, the most wretched and most drunken poor upon earth. You would find plenty of places to eat and drink along the way. London has about 8,000 saloons, something ke 2,000 coffee houses and it has thousands of restaurants and places for tea and cake. It bas 500 hotels, from enormous bulldings which cover acres and sleep thousands down to little inns which have rooms for a score London is a city of millionaires and pau- pers, of thousands who are very rich, of hundreds of thousands who spend money a8 freely as any people on earth, and of a milllon or so who are wretchedly poor. The town has 100,000 paupers and I cannot tell you how many millionaires. It has a king who has a civil list of $3,000,000 a year and dukes and earls who own towns and vast estates and lords and other golden drones galore. In the West End about Hyde Park you drive through street after street of magnificent palaces, and in the east and along the docks you may ride for miles and miles through sections where whole famil'es live In one room and where semi- starvation reigns. let me give you two pletures of Lon- don which I have seen during my stay. One is the church parade at Hyde Park, which takes place every noon on Sundays from 1 until 2 o'clock. This will give you some idea of the possible market for the best of Amer.can goods. Hyde Park ls a great ex panse of green stre ts, soft, velvety turf, beautiful lakes and walks and drives. On last Sunday there were 20,000 people walk- ing up and down the chlef thoroughfares, and these people represented the cream of London swelldom. 1 have never seen 80 many persons so well dressed. Every man and every boy wore a tall silk hat. All were gloved, and the men wore frock coats and trousers tightly creased. As a whole the American men are the best dressed of their kind in the world, but the Hyde Park crowd on Sundays is better dressed than they, as it represents only the best tailors of the kingdom. And then the women! My heart jumps as 1 think of them. There were at least 10,000 dainty girls and lordly dames, clad in Paris gowns and bonnets, and last but not lcast in American ghoes. They were good looking and as a rule tall and stately. They merely walked back and forth, some with men and some without, staring and laugh- ing and chatting. In the crowd I saw faces of every na- tionality under the sun; although the ma- jority were English. At the same time there were carriages, coaches and four-.n- hands driving along the roads outside the walks; there were scores of automoblles whistling by, and altogether the scene made me think that poverty was dead. It was the parade of the rich. Now let me give you a plcture of the parade of the poor. Imagine yourself on the Strand on the night the word came that the Boer war was ended and peacc had come. gvery one is mad with jo, and the lower classes have dropped work for a hol day. They have pourcd them- pelves from Whitechapel and the slums of other parts of the city and have come to Fleet street, the Strand and Trafalgar Square to celebrate the occasion. Many of them have been drinking all day and more are drinking now. The crowd consists of women and men, boys and girls, rushing, pushing and jostling one another as they move up and down the sldewalks and roadways. At times they stop the ‘bus es and the hansom cabs must go at a walk. The s are hard and many of them are red with dr'nk. Even the women are drunk, and every few steps you meet a party of them who are singing and dancing and throwing their arms around one another in their inebriate joy. Some have men with them and men and women pass along em bracing as they go. ’ Ycoung girls have long peacock feathers with which they tickle the men indis- criminately under the chins as they pass I stopped and leaned against the wall to make mental notes of the crowd Every now and then some giddy Whitechapel maiden with her hair frizzled over her ears and a sallor hat on the silde of her head chucked me under the chin or put a feather in my nose and told me to “lart.” Indeed it made me blush I was surprised at the drunkenness of the crowd, and especlally at the number of in- toxicated women. I have seen every great city of the world, but nowhere have I seen women drinking publicly in the saloons as they do here. On the peace night I saw drunken girls of 15 and some who seemed younger, although there were signs on the saloon windows saying that children under 14 would not be served. There were scores of women with bables in their arms dancing and shouting, their breaths redolent of whisky and gin. Some of the bables were not more than 2 weeks old, but their mothers bundled them up to their breasts and sang and danced with the rest. The saloons along the Strand were filled with half-drunken people of both sexes. 1 looked into saloon after saloon and did not find one in which there were not women drinking. Many of the women were gray halred, and even these were drunk. This drinking prevalls throughout London. The women patronize the saloons almost as much as the men, and you cannot drive throuzh the poorer section of a Saturday evening without seeing drunken women dancing, shuuting or quarreling. The scenes make me think of Dickens’ povels, and especially of Oliver Twist. The LONDON CHIMNEY SWEEPS. characters of that story were everywhere and Fagin and his pickpockets were abroad. There are no more expert thieves in the world than here, and I saw a good specimen of their work as I stood against the wall. Two men lost their watches in- side of two minutes. The first was an old follow with his wife. As the thief r ed away the good woman shed tears, saying “Yes, they've stolen my husband’'s watch.” The other was a dude in a tall hat, who, like myself, was out to see the fun. One thief knocked off the hat, another pushed the dude and a third grabbed at his watch- chain and took his gold repeater before he could turn around. I buttoned my coat up tightly and pushed my way through to one of the policemen, telling him of the pick- pockets. He replied: ““Yes, this is the pickpockets’' harvest. There will be hundreds of watches stolen tonight and we cannot prevent it. You had better keep off the side streets. There is such a jam here that we cannot watch the alleys which lead off the Strand. The girls will entice men iuto the dark places, when their pals will knock them down and rob them. The work is done in a minute and the thieves get away.” In the next day's paper I saw the report of a number of robberies of this kind, one man being knocked down and killed by the roughs. And still London has 15,000 policemen, and they are, T belleve, about the best police In the world. The city is so great, however, that they cannot take care of it all, although they do so very well in ordi- nary times The police are under the control of the home secretary and thelr jurisdiction ex- tends In every direction within fifteen miles of Chaiing Cross. Three hundred of them are mounted and a large part of their business is chasing blcycle riders and bicycle thieves. The police dress in blue with black hel- mets. They are not allowed to carry pis- tols and their sole weapons are short clubs. They are far more polite than our pollce- men, and this notwithstanding they do not recelve nalf the pay. The ordinary police- man gets {rom $330 to $460 a year, and a sergeant receives from $465 to $785. In ad- dition to this they are furnished with clothing or money in lleu thereof. But I must not forget the American in- vasion. Take a look at London's mighty paunch and see how it may be filled with American eatables. There are 6,000,000 mouths in the city {itself; every one of these has to be filled three times a day and already many are filled by us. In- deed, It has been rightly sald that Eng- land Is almost spoon-fed by the United States. If her outside supplies were shut off she could not live for more than six months. We annually eend her more than 28,000,000 pounds of beef, 39,000,000 pounds of bacon, 68,000,000 pounds of cheese, more than 50000000 bushels of wheat and than 100,000,000 bushels of barley The city has the greatest markets of the world. Take, for Iinstance, the Copen- hagen Fields cattle markets near Islington, one of the scenes of John Gllpin‘s ride They cover thirty acres and handle about 4,000,000 cattle a year. Four thousand beeves and 12,000 sheep are on the average sold there every market day and the place has accommodation for 10,000 cattle and 35.000 sheep Another great markat for cattle Is that of Smithfield, on the site where Bloody Queen Mary burnt the saintly John Rogers at the stake. The place has a bloody his- tory and It is bloody today, for It Is one of the chlef meat markets of London. It is filled with American beef, which is here more sold as the “rare roast beef of old Eng- land.” Then there is the Leadenhall mar- ket, where poultry has been sold for 400 yvears, and the great markets of Covent Garden, which sell fruits, vegetables and flowers. The Covent Garden market 1s one of the largest of London. It is within a stone's throw of the Strand and right in the heart cf the city. The houses consist of vast buildings of iron and glass, big enough for a national exposition. They belong to the duke of Bedford, who gets a rent of so much per week for every stall in them. Convent Garden is the chief wholesale market of its kind for all London. The best time to see it is shortly after day- break. I left my rooms about 4 o'clock a. m. and walked down to them. All the streets surrounding the market houses proper were filled with carts and wagons loaded with vegetables, Im- ¢gine the largest hay wagon you have ever seen piled high with green cabbages, so that the load is taller and broader than any lead of sheaves ever brought in from the wheat fields. The cabbages are laid in regular rows and there are thousands of heads of cabbage to the load. Then there were great loads of pink radishes, each radish no larger than a pigeon’s egg, piled up the same way, so carefully that they formed mighty cubes of pink balls. There were vast loads of spinach and carrots, onions and potatoes and all sorts of green stuff from water cress to asparagus. There was a great display of fruit in baskets and in crates. There were oranges from California and apples from Virginia and also fromw New York and Oregon. Many of the apple boxes were marked Tas- mania and some South Australia, the latter having been brought here on a forty days' trip In cold storage ships. There were hothouse grapes, peaches and strawberries. The strawberries sold at cents a basket and I was offered peaches at 85 cents a plece. The peaches were larger than any I have ever seen in the United States. They are raised under glass and are sold frpm boxes of soft white cotton, being handled as carefully as new babies Among the curious things sold are green gooseberries and rhubarb. This is the only place I know where they call rhubarb fruit Rhubarb and gooseberry tarts are served everywhere and my teeth are still on edge from trying to masticate the so- called green gooseberry tart. The berries are larger than ours, but so sour that they turn the face of a girl of 18 into that of an old maid of 30 as she bites into them Leaving the vegetable market I went to the buildinz adjoining where flowers are sold. I cannot describe the blaze of color and auty which greeted me as I en tered. The great bullding, as large as one of our biggest depots, was filled with blos somsa of every description from the hot- houses of England and the continent. There wore carloads of beautiful roses, vast quantities of calla liles, cornflowers as blue as the blue of our flag and masses of of tint The English are fond of flowers on thelir tables and at din- ner and luncheon every well-to-do family has 1's bouquet to look at, I regret to say that many of the hotels make a better dis play of flowers than of food A little later in the day there is a great retall market at Covent Garden. There are also fruit auctions, where fruit of all kinds Is sold in large quantities and where many of the local dealers come to buy The business is erormous, the sales of a single day running into tems of thousands of pounds I have talked with some of the mer- chants. They tell me that the London mar- flowers every LONDON HAS 15,000 POLICEMEN. ket is supplied with during the winter bring the best prices. apples by America and that our apples California fruit of all kinds in demand, and the market men believe that a good business: could be built up in the sale of our 1ate varieties of American peaches and of the hardier kinds of pears is FRANK G. CARPENTER. Whale Worth a Fortune More than $100,000 is what Captain James Earle, a New Bedford whaler now visiting in Hcno ulu, reulized in 1883 from one sperm whale, relates the Honolulu Advertiser. In fact the whale was one of the most valuable ever caught in any ocean. It was not the ninety barrels of oil which gave the levia- than its extraordinary value, for that was sold for something like $4,000, but within the whale's vast interior there was found a solld plece of ambergris weighing 780 pounds. This was the largest single piece of ambergris ever found, according to the records, and that it came from one lone whale made the rich discovery the more in- teresting to the sclentific world This 780-pound plece of ambergris was sold in chunks in all markets of the world for abcut £25,000 sterling, and it laid the foundation of wealth for almost every man interested in the whaling expedition, which originated in New Zealand. Captain Earle came here in 1857 whaling ship Europa as a cabin boy, his father then being first mate. He later wéht to New Zealand to join the whaler Splendid, which he fitted out, obtaining thereby a bounty of $10,000 offered by the New Zea- land government for the first whaler fitted out for service. He went second mate and rose by promotion until he became mas- ter and part owner. It was in October, 1882 on the as that Splendid, while cruising about the Chatham {slands, east of New Zealand, came upon the sperm whale which was the big- gest bonanza of the sea on record. Ninety barrels of oll were taken from it and while delving into the carcass the huge piece of ambergris was found Ambergris is a concretion formed only in the intestines of the sperm whale and is sometimes found floating on the surface of the sea like pumice stone, near where this animal cruises In it are often found imbedded the horny beaks of the squids on which the whale feeds. It was formerly used in medicine, alcohol and rendering them more lasting It affords about 85 per cent of a pecliar fatty and crystalline substances called ambrein The voyage of Splendid in that season was a fortunate one in every respect, for it came into Littleton port, w Zealand with the big plece of ambergris, worth welght in gold, and 1,100 barrels of sperm oil “When we arrived in port,” but is as a base now dissolved in in used perfumes, its said Captain Barle, “I telegraphed to the agent of the Otago Whaling company to come up He came, the ambergris was taken ashore loaded into a car, which was locked and the key stowed away in the nt's pocket, and he stood guard there, too, until the stuff was safely placed ““The first year that I had brought any ambergris into port we got £25 a pound for twenty-one pounds, but when this big piece came In the news so astonished everybody that cablegrams were sent all over the world, and the result was that the price dropped. Some went to London but as for my own share and carrled it a hurry to sell it, the market for it for the gray in London it I took it in bulk home with me. 1 in but thought by waiting would rise I got $18 an and $8 for the black had only brought $12 wasn't ounce while and $4."