Some Cities San Fran. Resurgam | Page 4

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 is the mother of many cities, directing the destiny of nations, from the Iron Gate to the Golden Horn. Vienna has been made brilliantly modern since 1858. Beside the sufferings of Constantinople our little calamity seems tame. Seven times during the last half century the city has been swept by fire, not to mention earthquakes, or pestilence, which on one occasion took with it three hundred thousand lives. Yet all the while it grows in magnificence faster than the invisible enemies of Mohammed