work of
civic patriotism. We hire the arts to build and decorate the homes of
business; the Bostonians inspire them to devote beauty and dignity to
the public pleasure and use. No," our friend concluded with irritating
triumph, "we are too vast, too many, for the finest work of the civic
spirit. Athens could be beautiful--Florence, Venice, Genoa were--but
Rome, which hired or enslaved genius to create beautiful palaces,
temples, columns, statues, could only be immense. She could only huddle
the lines of Greek loveliness into a hideous agglomeration, and lose
their effect as utterly as if one should multiply Greek noses and Greek
chins, Greek lips and Greek eyes, Greek brows and Greek heads of violet
hair, in one monstrous visage. No," he exulted, in this mortifying image
of our future ugliness, "when a city passes a certain limit of space and
population, she adorns herself in vain. London, the most lovable of the
mighty mothers of men, has not the charm of Paris, which, if one cannot
quite speak of her virgin allure, has yet a youth and grace which lend
themselves to the fondness of the arts. Boston is fast becoming of the
size of Paris, but if I have not misread her future she will be careful
not to pass it, and become as New York is."

We were so alarmed by this reasoning that we asked in considerable
dismay: "But what shall we do? We could not help growing; perhaps we
wished to overgrow; but is there no such thing as ungrowing? When the
fair, when the sex which we instinctively attribute to cities, finds
itself too large in its actuality for a Directoire ideal, there are
means, there are methods, of reduction. Is there no remedy, then, for
municipal excess of size? Is there no harmless potion or powder by which
a city may lose a thousand inhabitants a day, as the superabounding fair
loses a pound of beauty? Is there nothing for New York analogous to
rolling on the floor, to the straight-front corset, to the sugarless,
starchless diet? Come, you must not deny us all hope! How did Boston
manage to remain so small? What elixirs, what exercises, did she take or
use? Surely she did not do it all by reading and thinking!" Our friend
continued somewhat inexorably silent, and we pursued: "Do you think
that by laying waste our Long Island suburbs, by burning the whole
affiliated Jersey shore, by strangling the Bronx, as it were, in its
cradle, and by confining ourselves rigidly to our native isle of
Manhattan, we could do so