ttern came to England and was used in
Edwardian towns like Flint[123] and Winchelsea; then, too, it was
adopted at the other end of the civilized world by German soldiers in
Polish lands. Cracow, for example, owes to German settlers in the
mid-thirteenth century that curious chess-board pattern of its
innermost and oldest streets which so much puzzles the modern
visitor.[124] It is unnecessary here to follow further the renaissance
of town-planning. By intervals and revivals it continued to spread. In
1652 it reached Java, when the Dutch built Batavia. In 1682 it reached
America, when Penn founded Philadelphia. In 1753, when Kandahar was
refounded as a new town on a new site, its Afghan builders laid out a
roughly rectangular city, divided into four quarters meeting at a
central Carfax and divided further into many strangely rectangular
blocks of houses.[125]

[123] Compare E.A. Lewis, _Medieval Boroughs of Snowdonia_, pp.
30, 61 foll.

[124] So, too, Lemberg. Compare R.F. Kaindl, _Die Deutschen in
den Karpathenlaendern_, i. 178, 293; ii. 304; he does not, however,
deal with the actual plans.

[125] I have to thank the late Sir Alfred Lyall for a sight of a
survey made by English engineers in 1839.

But in growing, the old town-planning has passed into a new stage. The
Romans dealt with small areas, seldom more than three hundred acres
and often very much less. The town-plans of the Middle Ages and even
of modern times affected areas that were little larger. Only the last
days have brought development. Till the enormous changes of the
nineteenth century--changes which have transferred the termination of
ancient history from A.D. 476 to near A.D. 1800--the older fashions
remained, in town-life as in most other forms of civilized society.
Towns were still, with few exceptions, small and their difficulties,
if real, were simple. Save in half a dozen abnormal capitals, they
had, even in relatively modern days, no vast populations to be fed and
made into human and orderly citizens. They had no chemical industries,
no chimneys defiling the air, or drains defiling the water. Now,
builders have to face the many square miles of Chicago or Buenos
Ayres, to provide lungs for their cities, to fight with polluted
streams and smoke. Their problems are quite unlike those of the
ancients. When Cobbett, about 1800, called London the Great Wen, he
contrasted in two monosyllables the ancient ideal of a cit