Some Cities San Fran. Resurgam | Page 4

of great wealth and wonderful inventions we realize more
and more the value of the city to mankind, and the quality of the city as
a means of culture. Cities are not merely marts of commerce; they stand
for civility; they are civilization itself. No untried naked Adam in Eden
might ever pass for a civilized man. The city street is the school of
philosophy, of art, of letters; city society is the home of refinement.
When the rustic visits the city he puts on his best clothes and his best
manners. In their reciprocal relations the city is as men make it, while
from the citizen one may determine the quality of the city. The
atmosphere of the city is an eternal force. Therefore as we value the
refinement of the human mind, the enlargement of the human heart, we
shall value the city, and strive so to build, and adorn, and purify, that it
may achieve its ultimate endeavor.
Civic betterment has long been in progress among the more civilized
communities through the influence of cultured people capable of
appreciating the commercial as well as the aesthetical value of art. Vast
sums have been spent and great results accomplished, but they are
nothing as compared with the work yet to be done-work which will
continue through the ages and be finished only with the end of time.
And not only will larger wealth be yet more freely poured out on
artistic adornment, but such use of money will be regarded as the best
to which it can be applied. For though gold is not beautiful it can make
beauty, even that beauty which elevates and ennobles, which purifies
the mind and inspires the soul. Progress is rapid in this direction as in
many others. A breach of good taste in public works will ere long be
adjudged a crime. For already mediaeval mud has ceased to be

fashionable, and the picturesque in urban ugliness is picturesque no
longer. All the capitals of Europe have had to be made over,
Haussmannized, once or several times. Our own national capital we
should scarcely be satisfied with as its illustrious founder left it.
It is a hopeful sign amidst some discouraging ones that wealth as a
social factor and measure of merit is losing something of its prestige;
that it is no longer regarded by the average citizen as the supreme good,
or the pursuit of it the supreme aim in life; there are so many things
worth more than money, so many human aspirations and acquirements
worthy of higher considerations than the inordinate cravings of graft
and greed. Hoarded wealth especially is not so worshipful to-day as it
was yesterday, while the beautiful still grows in grace-the beautiful and
the useful, compelling improvement, always engendered by improved
environment.
Some cities are born in the purple-rare exceptions to the rule. San
Francisco is not one of these. St. Petersburg, the city of palaces, of
broad avenues and granite-faced quays, whose greatest afflictions are
the occasional overflow of the Neva and the dynamite habit, was
spoken into being by a monarch. Necessity stands sponsor for Venice,
the beautiful, with her streets of water-ways and airs of heavenly
harmony; while nature herself may claim motherhood of Swedish
Stockholm, brilliant with intermingling lakes islands and canals, rocks
hills and forests, rendering escape from the picturesque impossible.
Penn planted his Quakers about 1682, long before many of the present
large cities in America were begun, yet Philadelphia was one of the few
sketched in such generous proportions that little change was afterwards
necessary to make it one of the most spacious of urban commonwealths.
With this example before him came in 1791, more than a century later,
the father of his country, who permitted his surveyors so injudiciously
to cover the spot on the Potomac which he had chosen for the capital
city of the republic as to require much expensive remodeling later. Yet
what American can drive about Washington now and say it is not worth
the cost? Further, as an example, the repeated reconstruction and
adornment of the national capital by Congress are priceless to the
whole United States, the government therein bearing witness to the
value of the beautiful. And if of value on the Potomac, is it not equally
so at the portal of the Pacific?

A few other cities there have been which have arisen at the command
of man, potentate or pirate, besides those of the quaker Penn and the
tzar Peter-Alexandria, the old and the new, with Constantinople
between; the first by order of the poor world conqueror, at the hand of
the architect Dinocrates, two or three centuries before Caesar,
Cleopatra, and Antony, but made fit for them and their chariots by
streets a hundred feet wide.
The Danube