you can gratify your passion for going up and down stairs.  There is the best reason in the world why a tall house in the country should look grim, gaunt, and awkward; it is thoroughly inconvenient and out of place.  The area of arable land covered by human habitations does not yet interfere with agricultural products.  So let us spread ourselves freely.  When we have learned the beauty and the strength of co-operation for mutual helpfulness, we shall see the prevailing mode of constructing houses in cities very much modified.  Now they stand as books are placed on their shelves,—­vertically and edgewise.  They would hold just as many people, and be far more convenient, if they could be laid horizontally, one above the other.

[Illustration:  Breadth and height.]

True, this would involve floors impervious to sound, and fire-proof,—­by no means a fatal objection.  Since we can neither “fly nor go” in the air, like birds and angels, it is well for us, having found our appropriate level, to abide thereon as far as may be.  There is no doubt that where dwellings must be built compactly in “blocks,” as we call them, the “flat” arrangement, each tenement being complete on one floor, is the cheapest and best.  Even the fourth story in such a building is preferable to a house of eight or ten rooms, two on each floor.  But this does not concern you, unless you have a few thousands to invest in tenement-houses.  In the right place I like an old-fashioned one-story house, but most people have a prejudice against anything so unpretending.

One other fact besides the worth of co-operation I hope the dwellers in cities will learn to recognize practically.  When there were no swift and screaming locomotives, no cosey and comfortable horse-cars, no red and yellow omnibuses even, there was good reason why men must forego the boon of country air; must forget the color of the ground, the smell of the green things growing, and the shape of the heavens above them.  But the reason no longer exists.  Doubtless the business of a city should be as compact as possible; but for its dwellings, every consideration of comfort and happiness, of physical and moral well-being, demands that the inhabitants shall make the most of their migratory resources and—­scatter; find room to build, not tenements or residences, but homes for themselves and their children.  In the old time safety was found by crowding together within mural walls.  Now the case is reversed.  Where the population is densest, temptations and dangers do most abound.  We’ve outgrown the walls, let us overcome the evils that were bred within them.