For the rest, as I say, and with the exception of those rare survivals of which Tilbury is the most striking, modern industrialism, down to its last manifestations, has captured the Lower Thames and stands in a bleak contrast against the windy emptiness of the flats. Nowhere is one more oddly struck by this than opposite the great tanks which have been put up for the storage of petrol--the last of our necessities. From Tilbury upwards, wherever there is available space or good ground, it is the haste, the necessity, and the carelessness of modern exchange directed for the immediate profit of men who perpetually change their methods of acquirement (and even their homes) that marks the river. It is a new sort of desolation, the obverse (and not a pleasant one) of that more natural desolation which Nature made by stretching out her marshes and lagoons upon either side of the tideway. And I say “exchange,” not production. Thames-side used to do many things, but in particular to tan leather and to build ships. The tanneries have nearly gone; the shipyards are in process of death. In the last journey which I made up the tide some months ago to see London once more from the river I passed what may be the last of the men-of-war built upon Thames-side. It lay completing upon the northern shore. It was the ship round which had turned the discussion whether or no the Thames could still successfully build against the north, and if the official answer is to be that it cannot, then this decision will mark the end of the oldest trade of the river and that most native to its life. But we live in a time when most things are dying. For all this lamentable cloak of purposeless industrialism, chaotic and already murmuring with the sounds of its own dissolution, the gradual envelopment of a man who comes up river, his reception by the hugeness of modern London is a thing which no one who has experienced it can forget. Indeed, the utter ruin of order and of plan, which is but the outward manifestation of the ruin of religion, has destroyed the sense of approach everywhere around that great helpless, apathetic nation which we call London, save where it could not be wholly destroyed, and that is along the water which was its most ancient highway. [Illustration: RICHMOND BRIDGE]