The geographical, municipal, and political centre is, of course, that spot where the Town Hall stands, a grim and massive building in the Corinthian style, with that air of age and permanency about its rusticated basement, as though when the Anglo-Saxons came they had found it here, the relic of an ancient civilisation. But the Town Hall can lay no claim to antiquity, built as it was in 1832. Around it, in an open space of a singularly irregular shape, are the General Post Office, the Art Gallery, the great Free Library, and other municipal buildings proper to a city so rich and prosperous; and, scattered about the pavements, a miscellaneous collection of statues, facing towards New Street Station, as though they formed some kind of deputation assembled there to welcome visitors. It is a very oddly assorted crowd, captained by Queen Victoria, and formed of such varied items as Joseph Priestley (who with his burning glass looks as though he were critically examining a bad coin), Peel, John Skirrow, Wright, George Dawson, James Watt, and Sir Josiah Mason. In the little corner called Chamberlain Square the curious will find a monument to the energy and enterprise (the “pushfulness” as those who love him not might call it) of Joseph Chamberlain, without whose work and initiative Birmingham would not own, as it does to-day, its gas, water, and tramways, and could not show such evidences of progress in new and handsome streets and model government. It is a far cry from the Red Radical days of Birmingham’s great Mayor in 1874 to those of the Colonial Secretary, a pillar of the Empire and the darling of Duchesses. Perhaps no other man has, politically, travelled so far, estranged so many friends, or made such strangely alien alliances, with the result that his sheaf has been exalted over his brethren these years past. Hence the extreme bitterness of the hatred his name arouses in certain circles. The memorial to his work on the comparatively small stage of Birmingham, before he trod the boards of Westminster, takes the form of a Gothic canopied fountain, with a profile portrait medallion, whereon one may trace in the aggressive, sharp-pointed nose a striking likeness to William Pitt, and that suggestion of the crafty fox the venomous caricaturists of a later day have seized and used to such advantage. III Sir William Dugdale, in his diary, under date of July 16th, 1679, mentions the first Birmingham coach we have any notice of. He says, “I came out of London by the stage-coach of Bermicham to Banbury.” That is all we learn of specifically Birmingham coaches until 1731, when Rothwell’s began to ply to London in two days and a half, according to the old coaching bill still preserved.