As for Bilston, where is the man heroic enough to sound its praises? Passengers by railway, passing through Bilston, see only deserted slag-heaps, cinder mounds, and a general area of desolation, but the road reveals Bilston in an added squalor of grimy houses and frowzy courts. The collieries and ironworks that created the town are things of the past, and their ruins only remain to tell of what it was a century ago. Surely never was there a more second-hand looking place than Bilston is now, with its long street apparently divided between old-clothes shops, “marine stores,” pawnbrokers’ establishments, and public-houses. Even Bilston gritstone, once prized for the making of grindstones, is under a cloud, and the old saying, that “a Dudley man and a Bilston grindstone may be found all the world over,” takes a new significance in the fact that the enterprising native, if he wishes scope for his enterprise, must go forth in the world to places as yet unexhausted. But the decay of the town perhaps dates more certainly from the fearful times of the cholera epidemic of 1882, when Bilston suffered more severely than any other place; when so many died that help had to be brought from other districts to bury them; and when hundreds of children were left fatherless and motherless in the stricken town. Of a population numbering 14,492, no fewer than 742 died. You enter Bilston across a tract of abandoned coal mines, and leave it for a similar waste. The forlorn and derelict condition of these deserted mining fields, strewn with shale and piled with fantastic, but always grim and forbidding, rubbish heaps, is a blot upon these busy districts, and a reproach to the condition of affairs that permits such things. Apart from the certainty that the mineral wealth of a country should be the property of the State rather than of the individual landowner, the question of the deserted coal-fields is a very serious one. Here, in these barren and absolutely unproductive wastes, the cynical selfishness of the landed class is abundantly evident. The coal measures exhausted and the collieries closed down, the land is unoccupied and contributes nothing in rates or taxes. It may lie thus, unfenced and hideously sterile, until such time as it is wanted for building operations. In many instances it will never be required for that purpose, and so much land has thus permanently become as useless as the Sahara or the stony deserts of Arabia. There is no reason, beyond individual self-interest, why such a state of things should exist. Before the pits were sunk and coal dug, these wild and uncared-for tracts were in many cases cultivated fields, from which the soil was removed when the colliery companies began operations. In leasing ground for this purpose, landowners usually insert a clause protecting themselves in the event of the coal being exhausted and the works deserted; a clause binding lessees’ to restore the surface soil, or to pay a fine of £30 an acre.