Page:Historic towns of the middle states (IA historictownsofm02powe).pdf/371

 institutions like Girard College and the Penitentiary, with a cemetery or two, like rocks in a moving stream, have stopped and divided the glacier-like spread of the city. These things have made Philadelphia, like London, a city of accretions from divers centres, and not, like Paris or New York, a steady, symmetrical and continuous growth from one organic centre.

The war found a city which, united, had more than the area of London (Philadelphia, 82,807 acres; London, 74,692), and at almost every stage of the growth of the two a quarter of the population of the vaster metropolis. Since room is the chief factor in civic comfort, there has never been a year in which the average man has not been just about four times as comfortable in Philadelphia as in London, and he has always had higher wages by a quarter to a half, paid less for food and lodgings, and paid more for clothing, light and coal. He has lived here, a family to a house, where a quarter of London has been a family to two rooms. Most of all, for twenty years past has this growth of the small houses of labor gone on, their number swelling faster than the tale of families seeking them. These