From man’s drawing the world closer and closer together, his own affairs and institutions have consolidated.  Concentration may typify the chief movement of the age—­concentration, classification, order; the reduction of friction between the parts of the social organism.  The urban tendency of the rural populations led to terrible congestion in the great cities.  There was stifling and impure air, and lo, rapid transit at once attacked the evil.  Every great city has become but the nucleus of a greater city which surrounds it; the one the seat of business, the other the seat of domestic happiness.  Between the two, night and morning, by electric road, steam railway, and bicycle path, ebbs and flows the middle-class population.  And in the same direction lies the remedy for the tenement evil.  In the cleansing country air the slum cannot exist.  Improvement in road-beds and the means of locomotion, a tremor of altruism, a little legislation, and the city by day will sleep in the country by night.

What a play-ball has this planet of ours become!  Steam has made its parts accessible and drawn them closer together.  The telegraph annihilates space and time.  Each morning every part knows what every other part is thinking, contemplating, or doing.  A discovery in a German laboratory is being demonstrated in San Francisco within twenty-four hours.  A book written in South Africa is published by simultaneous copyright in every English-speaking country, and on the following day is in the hands of the translators.  The death of an obscure missionary in China, or of a whisky smuggler in the South Seas, is served up, the world over, with the morning toast.  The wheat output of Argentine or the gold of Klondike is known wherever men meet and trade.  Shrinkage or centralization has been such that the humblest clerk in any metropolis may place his hand on the pulse of the world.  And because of all this, everywhere is growing order and organization.  The church, the state; men, women, and children; the criminal and the law, the honest man and the thief, industry and commerce, capital and labour, the trades and the professions, the arts and the sciences—­all are organizing for pleasure, profit, policy, or intellectual pursuit.  They have come to know the strength of numbers, solidly phalanxed and driving onward with singleness of purpose.  These purposes may be various and many, but one and all, ever discovering new mutual interests and objects, obeying a law which is beyond them, these petty aggregations draw closer together, forming greater aggregations and congeries of aggregations.  And these, in turn, vaguely merging each into each, present glimmering adumbrations of the coming human solidarity which shall be man’s crowning glory.

Oakland, California. 
January 1900.

THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL

Speaking of homes, I am building one now, and I venture to assert that very few homes have received more serious thought in the planning.  Let me tell you about it.  In the first place, there will be no grounds whatever, no fences, lawns, nor flowers.  Roughly, the dimensions will be forty-five feet by fifteen.  That is, it will be fifteen feet wide at its widest—­and, if you will pardon the bull, it will be narrower than it is wide.