lose you and all the rest of it; for having tried it yourself you know
that it is still winter within the house walls, and will not be April
there till well into June.




II

CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS, MOSTLY ODIOUS


It might be, somewhat overhardily, advanced that there is no such thing
as positive fact, but only relative fact. The mind, in an instinctive
perception of this hazardous truth, clings to contrast as the only basis
of inference, and in now taking my tenth or twentieth look at London I
have been careful to keep about me a pocket vision of New York, so as to
see what London is like by making constantly sure what it is not like. A
pocket vision, say, of Paris, would not serve the same purpose. That is
a city of a legal loveliness, of a beauty obedient to a just municipal
control, of a grandeur studied and authorized in proportion and relation
to the design of a magnificent entirety; it is a capital nobly realized
on lines nobly imagined. But New York and London may always be
intelligibly compared because they are both the effect of an indefinite
succession of anarchistic impulses, sometimes correcting and sometimes
promoting, or at best sometimes annulling one another. Each has been
mainly built at the pleasure of the private person, with the community
now and then swooping down upon him, and turning him out of house and
home to the common advantage. Nothing but our racial illogicality has
saved us from the effect of our racial anarchy in the social structure