ement. If a piece of this same field, however,
could be carefully cut out and moved and fitted to a city
door-yard--bobolinks and daisies and shadows and all, precisely as they
are--it would not be beautiful. Long grass conforms to a law of nature
where nature has room, and short grass conforms to a law of nature where
nature has not room.

When, for whatever reason, of whatever importance, men and women choose
to be so close together, that it is not fitting they should have
freedom, and when they choose to have so little room to live in that
development is not fitting lest it should inconvenience others, the
penalty follows. When grass-blades are crowded between walls and fences,
the more they can be made to look alike the more pleasing they are, and
when an acre of ground finds itself covered with a thousand people, or a
teacher of culture finds himself mobbed with pupils, the law of nature
is the same. Whenever crowding of any kind takes place, whether it be in
grass, ideas, or human nature, the most pleasing as well as the most
convenient and natural way of producing a beautiful effect is with the
Lawn Mower. The dead level is the logic of crowded conditions. The city
grades down its hills for the convenience of reducing its sewer problem.
It makes its streets into blocks for the convenience of knowing where
every home is, and how far it is, by a glance at a page, and, in order
that the human beings in it (one set of innumerable nobodies hurrying to
another set of innumerable nobodies) may never be made to turn out
perchance for an elm on a sidewalk, it cuts down centuries of trees, and
then, out of its modern improvements, its map of life, its woods in
rows, its wheels on tracks, and its souls in pigeonholes--out of its
huge Checker-board under the days and nights--it lifts its eyes to the
smoke in heaven, at last, and thanks God it is civilised!

The substantial fact in the case would seem to be that every human being
born into the world has a right to be treated as a special creation all
by himself. Society can only be said to be truly civilised in proportion
as it acts on this fact. It is because in the family each being is
treated as one out of six or seven, and in the school as one out of six
hundred, that the family (with approximately good parents) comes nearer
to being a model school than anything we have.

If we deliberately prefer to live in crowds for the larger part of our
lives, we must expect our li