ue in its
most literal and mortifying sense.

There is some excuse for the crowded and irregular character of
Old-World cities. They grew, and were not builded. Accumulations
of people, who lighted like bees upon a chance branch, they found
themselves hived in obdurate brick and mortar before they knew it; and
then, to meet the necessities of their cribbed, cabined, and confined
condition, they must tear down sacred landmarks, sacrifice invaluable
possessions, and trample on prescriptive rights, to provide
breathing-room for their gasping population. Besides, air, water, light,
and cleanliness are modern innovations. The nose seems to have acquired
its sensitiveness within a hundred years,--the lungs their objection to
foul air, and the palate its disgust at ditch-water like the Thames,
within a more recent period. Honestly dirty, and robustly indifferent to
what mortally offends our squeamish senses, our happy ancestors fattened
on carbonic acid gas, and took the exhalations of graveyards and gutters
with a placidity of stomach that excites our physiological admiration.
If they died, it was not for want of air. The pestilence carried, them
off,--and that was a providential enemy, whose home-bred origin nobody
suspected.

It must seem to foreigners of all things the strangest, that, in a
country where land is sold at one dollar and twenty-five cents the acre
by the square mile, there should in any considerable part of it be a
want of room,--any necessity for crowding the population into pent-up
cities,--any narrowness of streets, or want of commons and parks. And
yet it is an undeniable truth that our American cities are all suffering
the want of ample thoroughfares, destitute of adequate parks and
commons, and too much crowded for health, convenience, or beauty. Boston
has for its main street a serpentine lane, wide enough to drive the cows
home from their pastures, but totally and almost fatally inadequate
to be the great artery of a city of two hundred thousand people.
Philadelphia is little better off with her narrow Chestnut Street,
which purchases what accommodation it affords by admitting the parallel
streets to nearly equal use, and thus sacrificing the very idea of a
metropolitan thoroughfare, in which the splendor and motion and life
of a metropolis ought to be concentrated. New York succeeds in making
Broadway what the Toledo, the Strand, the Linden Strasse, the Italian
Boulevards are; but the street is not