WORTH WHILE TO LIVE IN A LARGE CITY.
The Real Blessings of Urban Life Have
Been Too Much Neglected By
the Apostles of the Country.
City life has been more or less maligned—unintentionally. Unhealthful crowding, lack of the inspiration of outdoor life, and greater immorality are the principal charges. Lately, however, people have begun to believe that the city is little if any more immoral, proportionately to its inhabitants, than the country; that the absence of outdoor life has compensations, especially when one can spend part of the year in the country; that most of the dangers of crowding can be averted by improved sanitary methods and a greater number of parks. Edward S. Martin, writing in Appleton's Magazine, states the case attractively:
After all, there is an unrivaled attraction about human society, and it is considerably wholesome. It takes superior people to thrive on solitude even with quiet thrown in. Feebler folk have been known to regenerate even in the blessed country. It is no more possible in these days to stop the country people from coming to town than to stop the rivers from flowing to the sea.
The cities offer the best opportunities to the people who are qualified to improve them. The cities are the great markets for talent and skill, as well as for commodities. They would be badly off if the energy that makes them hum were not perpetually re-enforced out of the great country reservoirs. The country would be a worse place if the superfluous vigor that is bred there had not the cities in which to spend itself.
To get to some town is the natural and legitimate aspiration of a considerable proportion of the sons and daughters of American farmers. But as the waters that run to the sea are carried back by the process of evaporation, so there must be, as our cities grow greater, a return current out of them countryward for the people for whom town life is no longer profitable, and whose nerves and thews need nature's medication.
There is such a current as it is. People who get rich in town promptly provide themselves with country homes, and spend more and more of the year in them as their years increase and their strength declines. But for the people who don't get rich, the combination, or the transition, is not so easy. A due proportion of the people who are game to stand more noise, canned food, and struggle in their lives, and who ought to get to town, will get there.
The other process—to get back into the country the families, and especially the children, who have had more continuous city life than is good for them—needs a good deal of outside assistance, and gets some, though not yet as much as it requires.