bridge-Indianapolis tradition--with streets far more curvily winding
than the streets of Cambridge, and sidewalks of a strip of concrete
between green turf-bands that recalled the original sidewalks of
Indianapolis and even of the rural communities around Indianapolis. Cozy
homes, each in its own garden, with its own clothes-drier, and each
different from all the rest! Homes that the speculative builder, recking
not of the artistic sobriety, had determined should be picturesque at
any cost of capricious ingenuity! And not secure homes, because, though
they were occupied by their owners, their owners had not built them--had
only bought them, and would sell them as casually as they had bought.
The apartment-house will probably prove stronger than these throwbacks.
And yet the time will come when even the apartment-house will be
regarded as a picturesque survival. Into what novel architecture and
organization of living it will survive I should not care to prophesy,
but I am convinced that the future will be quite as interestingly human
as the present is, and as the past was.

IV

SOME ORGANIZATIONS

"What strikes and frightens the backward European as much as anything in
the United States is the efficiency and fearful universality of the
telephone. Just as I think of the big cities as agglomerations pierced
everywhere by elevator-shafts full of movement, so I think of them as
being threaded, under pavements and over roofs and between floors and
ceilings and between walls, by millions upon millions of live filaments
that unite all the privacies of the organism--and destroy them in order
to make one immense publicity! I do not mean that Europe has failed to
adopt the telephone, nor that in Europe there are no hotels with the
dreadful curse of an active telephone in every room. But I do mean that
the European telephone is a toy, and a somewhat clumsy one, compared
with the inexorable seriousness of the American telephone. Many
otherwise highly civilized Europeans are as timid in addressing a
telephone as they would be in addressing a royal sovereign. The average
European middle-class householder still speaks of his telephone, if he
has one, in the same falsely casual tone as the corresponding American
is liable to speak of his motor-car. It is naught--a negligible
trifle--but somehow it comes into the conversation!

"How odd!" you exclaim. And you are right. It is we Europeans who are
wrong, through no particular