Alison, Carlyle and all the great historiographers who have essayed the French Revolution go into long preambles of the causes leading up to the principal drama, antedating, by some years, the assembling of the States-general. I am very fond of the opening chosen by Charles Dickens for his “Tale of Two Cities,” namely, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The contradictory statement is yet so graphic as to suggest to my mind all the preamble I need for a chapter upon the Reign of Terror in American domestic architecture, especially as I have already touched upon the remote causes in preceding chapters.
If money was ever to be made without the impending shadow of nervous prostration and heart failure—I mean a decent sum of money, a competency—that opportunity presented itself with dazzling splendor in
“And that house with the Coopilow’s his’n.”—Bret Harte.
A FIFTH AVENUE MANSION DURING THE REIGN OF TERROR.
the loyal States of the Union during the latter years of the civil war and those immediately succeeding. All kinds of property advanced in value, no matter what the kind was. Anything—even cobblestones would have been a good purchase. The great boom of the Transitional period was entirely eclipsed, and people who never expected to be wealthy, people with the humblest ambitions, people whose callings, ordinarily, would not warrant any such hopes, had affluence literally forced upon them. I am sorry that most of the fortunes thus made had to be lost again upon the inevitable return of normal conditions—sorry as I am when I read a story of Captain Kidd, that the treasure-box has always to sink out of sight at the moment when the happy finders are rejoicing, and the future seems assured.
I do not know of a political economist, not excepting Henry George, who has had “the nerve,” shall I say, to attribute any of the blessings of civilization to war, pestilence and catastrophes. Yet, as nearly as a spectator may judge by effects, these direful things are all conducive to the greatest amount of comfort and ease of those who do not dwell too close to the points of friction. The swifter is dissolution, up to a certain ratio, at least, with the number of births, the greater the wealth, per capita, for the survivors. The survivors of the civil war who lived in the undevastated territory of the Northern States were largely a happy lot. It began to look for them as though God had decided to abolish the odds in favor of the bank, so to speak, and that life would be, henceforward, a square game affording everybody a chance to nibble at the crust of prosperity, not each one subject to gain only as another is bereft. Some inexorable condition appeared to have given way, for, at last, there was enough to go ’round—yes, more than enough; and with their surplus funds mounting higher and higher, these alarmingly prosperous people were much addicted to the erection of houses with “coopilows.”