A MOVING PAVEMENT.

The old logicians seeking a formal definition of “man” invented several curious aliases for him, such as a “cooking animal” and a “tool-making animal.” If our civilisation develops on its present plan it will soon be more accurate to describe him as a riding animal. Already we are told that no Londoner walks a hundred yards if he can find any means of conveyance, and it appears that in America this dependence on traction is becoming national.

In a few generations the human legs may have become as superfluous and absurd as the penguin’s wings. The latest blow at them has been struck by the Municipality of Paris. The Parisians, like ourselves, suffer from congestion of traffic. M. DESVAUX proposes to relieve it by the construction of trottoirs roulants. The French phrase has to an English ear a dizzy sound, which, to be fair, is not necessarily inherent in the thing.

There is no reason why a moving footpath should be more subversive of dignity and self-control than a moving staircase, upon which most Londoners can remain sufficiently perpendicular. Moreover, the moving footpath is not merely an inventor’s project. It was tried and not found wanting at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. The Municipal Council, at any rate, think it sufficiently practical to approve the proposal in principle and call for a report on technical, administrative, and financial details.

Some time is clearly to elapse before we all go down the Strand or the boulevards on a trottoir roulant. To demonstrate that what was found popular at an exhibition is not necessarily adapted to the streets of a great city would be superfluous. At the exhibition, we believe, the moving footpath moved overhead. M. DESVAUX inclines to vote for an underground trottoir roulant in the streets.

We are not well acquainted with the subterranean geography of Paris, though we suspect that the difficulty and expense of making shallow subways will be found as great there as in other cities. The route proposed for the first experiment is along the great boulevard from the Madeleine to the Place de la République, which may certainly be called the main stream of Parisian life. No one who has been borne down its eddies on a fine afternoon will dispute that the tide of traffic, if by no means “too full for sound or foam,” is much too full for swift movement.

It would be an impertinence to advise the City Fathers of Paris as to the needs of their city, but we cannot help wondering whether swift movement is what the throng in the boulevard wants. The gentle art of watching your fellow creatures is, after all, dependent upon retaining control of your own movements. To criticise other people’s clothes, complexions, figures, to look into shop windows, to chat with a casual friend, is not comfortably to be done upon a trottoir roulant.

So we may still have some hopes of the human leg. Even an urban population may preserve it from atrophy as indispensable to the sweet and dear delight of loafing.