Francisco conflagration; yet it was rebuilt better than before in three
and 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 Marche shops, arcades, colonnades, great open spaces adorned with
statues, forest parks, elysian driveways, and broad boulevards cut
through mediaeval 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 knowledge. The Assyrians
made terraces, nature teaching them. On the level plain building ground
was raised forty feet for effect. Like all artists of precivilization,
the Assyrians placed adornment before convenience, as appeared in
Nineveh on the Tigris and Babylon on the Euphrates. At Thebes and
Palmyra it was the same, their palaces of alabaster, if one chooses to
believe what is said, covering, some of them, a hundred acres. The
fashion now is to build upward rather than outward. Besides this
alabaster acreage there are to be taken into account the pyramids,
artificial mountains, and endless towertowns, supposed to be an
improvement on whatever existed before their time. Around the
Mediterranean and over India way were once hundreds of charming places
like the Megara suburb of Carthage and the amphitheatre of Rhodes,
prolific in classic art and architecture, precious gifts of the gods.