Page:Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam.djvu/23

 a half years. Always the city is improved in the rebuilding; how much, depends upon the intelligence and enterprise of the people.

Paris is brilliant with everything that takes the eye—palaces, arches, Bon Marché shops, arcades, colonnades, great open spaces adorned with statues, forest parks, elysian driveways, and broad boulevards cut through mediæval quarters in every direction, as well for air as for protection from the canaille blockaded in the narrow streets. San Francisco may have some canaille of her own to boast of one of these days; canaille engendered from the scum of Europe and Asia, and educated at our expense for our destruction. Over and over, these two cities, each a world metropolis, have been renovated and reconstructed, the work in fact going on continuously.

For some of the most effective of our urban elaborations we must go back to the first of city builders of whom we have knowl-