ister a new high mark in municipal
intelligence and a new record among the rebuilt cities, by making more
sweet than any other city ever made them, the uses of adversity.

The fire of 1904 found Baltimore a town of narrow highways, old
buildings, bad pavements, and open gutter drains. The streets were laid
in what is known as "southern cobble," which is the next thing to no
pavement at all, being made of irregular stones, large and small, laid
in the dirt and tamped down. For bumps and ruts there is no pavement in
the world to be compared with it. There were no city sewers. Outside a
few affluent neighborhoods, the citizens of which clubbed together to
build private sewers, the cesspool was in general use, while domestic
drainage emptied into the roadside gutters. These were made passable, at
crossings, by stepping stones, about the bases of which passed
interesting armadas of potato peelings, floating, upon wash days, in
water having the fine Mediterranean hue which comes from diluted
blueing. Everybody seemed to find the entire system adequate; for, it
was argued, the hilly contours of the city caused the drainage quickly
to be carried off, while as for typhoid and mosquitoes--well, there had
always been typhoid and mosquitoes, just as there had always been these
open gutters. It was all quite good enough.

Then the fire.

And then the upbuilding of the city--not only of the acres and acres
comprising the burned section, in which streets were widened and
skyscrapers arose where fire-traps had been--but outside the fire zone,
where sewers were put down and pavements laid. Nor was the change merely
physical. With the old buildings, the old spirit of _laissez faire_ went
up in smoke, and in the embers a municipal conscience was born. Almost
as though by the light of the flames which engulfed it, the city began
to see itself as it had never seen itself before: to take account of
stock, to plan broadly for the future.

Nor has the new-born spirit died. Only last year an extensive red-light
district was closed effectively and once for all. Baltimore is to-day
free from flagrant commercialized vice. And if not quite all the old
cobble pavements and open-gutter drains have been eliminated, there are
but few of them left--left almost as though for purposes of
contrast--and the Baltimorean who takes you to the Ghetto and shows you
these ancient remnants may immediately thereafter escort you to the
Fallsway, where the other