Page:Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam.djvu/13

 progress. Look at Edinburgh, for example. With all its Scotch thrift and neatness, there yet remains the ill-conditioned and once filthy quarter, beside which rise the old-time ten-story houses built into the hillside, while in the modern part of the city in sharp contrast are broad streets and open squares and fine buildings. In America the birth of towns is quite different. Here are no plantings of trembling poverty under lordly walls, but bold pioneering, forecasting agriculture and commerce; no Babel building, with "Go to, let us build here a Cleveland or a Cincinnati," but rather, "Here for the present we will abide." If, however, serfdom and mediævalism were absent in New World town-planting, so also were aestheticism or any appreciation of the beautiful apart from the useful. Old cities require reconstruction to make them what modern taste and intelligence demand; settlements in their incipiency are dominated by