Besides, air, water, light,
and cleanliness are modern innovations. The nose seems to have acquired
its sensitiveness within a hundred years,--the lungs their objection to
foul air, and the palate its disgust at ditch-water like the Thames,
within a more recent period. Honestly dirty, and robustly indifferent to
what mortally offends our squeamish senses, our happy ancestors fattened
on carbonic acid gas, and took the exhalations of graveyards and gutters
with a placidity of stomach that excites our physiological admiration.
If they died, it was not for want of air. The pestilence carried, them
off,--and that was a providential enemy, whose home-bred origin nobody
suspected.
It must seem to foreigners of all things the strangest, that, in a
country where land is sold at one dollar and twenty-five cents the acre
by the square mile, there should in any considerable part of it be a
want of room,--any necessity for crowding the population into pent-up
cities,--any narrowness of streets, or want of commons and parks. And
yet it is an undeniable truth that our American cities are all suffering
the want of ample thoroughfares, destitute of adequate parks and
commons, and too much crowded for health, convenience, or beauty.
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