Had I had the ear of such a pious founder, I would have counselled him to leave part of his ill-got gains as a fund for prosecuting, pillorying, pelting, daubing with hatred and ridicule, whipping at the cart's tail of public opinion, transporting to some Malebolge, foul with their own concoctions, those unspeakable humbugs, who, not content with the lower-class religious papers as an area to be defiled by their lying advertisements, impudently deface the fair scenes of Surrey with loathsome placards of this and that mischievous or worthless nostrum, to sicken the considerate passer-by at the thought of popular ignorance and credulity so easily preyed upon. Some day this mean offence may be repressed by law. Might we not begin by restricting the pill-and potion-mongers to Hackney Marsh or Barking Level as a sink for their shameless besliming? There is no spot in Surrey, not even the New Cut, Lambeth, nor the Sewage Farm of Croydon, that deserves such pollution. The endowment above invited may be vested in a body bearing the mystic device S. C. A. P. A., a league of champions sworn to slay this hideous Jabberwock, which one should not fear to mention by its legion names, for the last thing such an impostor dare do is to look twelve honest men in the face and have wrung out of him the composition of his panacea, swallowed so trustfully by the fools who enrich knaves.
Staringly mendacious advertisements are not the only scandal to raise the gorge of a poor but honest wayfarer on Surrey's countless roads, alive with all kinds of travel, from farm-waggons to cycles, from four-horse coaches to tramps. At their London ends, the highways are cut up by
[Illustration: ST. CATHERINE'S CHAPEL, NEAR GUILDFORD.]
tram-lines, which threaten to go far, unless this locomotive growth be nipped by the blast of motor cars. The invasion of the motor is still a sore subject along once quieter roadsides of Surrey. How Cobbett would have blustered if, on some rural ride, he had fallen in with a modern "dead weight" hurrying out of the "Wen" at full career, on his 60 h.-p. Mercedes, a flashy show of paint and furs! But one need not have any special spite against the "jews and jobbers" who were his _bêtes noirs_, to be choked by indignation in the fog of dust and smoke through which one catches a hasty glimpse of bugbears in armour, masked and bandaged, like the uncanny monstrosities of Mr. Wells' stories. It is all very well to remember how railways, too, were banned by prejudice, so that some half-century ago a liberal-minded John Bull, like the chronicler of Jorrocks and Soapey Sponge, still undertakes to apologise for those novelties on the score of their useful service to country life. But trains do not drive people off the roads and out of snug homes that lie too near the dusty triumph of Goth and Vandal chariots, "rigged with curses dark." Far more terrible are such swift Juggernauts than the insidious speed of the cyclist, who has lived down his reproach as a "cad on castors," being indeed kept considerate by the chance of getting the worst of it in case of collision with man or beast, whereas there can be no standing against the weighty momentum of those Bulls of Bashan, "hazing and mazing the blessed _roads_ with the devil's own team"--nay, the very fields, into which they scatter grit over strawberry beds and haycocks as well as hedgerows. And what one grudges most in the mad speed of the motorist is that, while he makes a moving blot on the landscape, his goggles can snatch but dim joy from prospects through which he is borne in such a whirl of excitement past one lunatic asylum to another.