Page:Historic towns of the middle states (IA historictownsofm02powe).pdf/364

 other, the fringe of the city limits becoming an Alsatia still apparent, mechanics' homes crowding just beyond as they still do, until met north and even south by more pretentious dwellings. In this thirty years the city grew from 42,000 to 108,000, and it faced first the problem to which only the American and Australian city has proved fully equal in all the round of semitropical summers north or south of the equator. The city, as it inherited from England its city government, had also inherited from there its well-water supply, its surface drainage, its slovenly streets, its practice of crowding the homes of the poor on back lots, so as to fill the area on which they stood with unsavory wynds, and its habit of intramural interment and intramural slaughter-*houses, all which, even the Latin cities of two thousand years ago, taught by hotter summers, had outgrown. In the tepid temperature and light but even rain-fall in England these worked few ills until the middle of this century. Under our torrid summer, our tropical rain-fall, and our swift changes, all these things meant disease and death, and the unconscious problem which faced the city a century ago and left its mark on the map was recorded in