The effect of this taste for structural beauty on the appearance of the streets of their towns was an important element in making them very different from our cramped and narrow pathways. {335} The late Mr. Ernest Crosby once expressed this very emphatically in an after-dinner speech, by detailing his experience with regard to Havana. He had visited the Cuban capital some twenty years ago, and found it very picturesque in its old Spanish ways. It is true the streets were dirty and the death-rate was somewhat high, but the vista that you saw when you came around the corner of a street, was not the same that you had seen around every other corner for twenty miles; it was different. It was largely a city of homes, with some thought of life being made happy, rather than merely being laborious. It was a place to live in and enjoy life while it lasted, and not merely a place to exist in and make money. He came north by land. The first town that he struck on the mainland, he said, reminded him of Hoboken. Every other town that he struck in the North reminded him more and more of Hoboken, until he came to the immortal Hoboken itself. The American end of the Anglo-Saxon idea seemed to him to make all the towns like Hoboken as far as possible. There is only one town in this country that is not like Hoboken, and that is Washington; and whenever we let the politicians work their wills on that--witness the Pension Building--it has a tendency to grow more and more like Hoboken. Perhaps we shall be able to save it. As for Havana, he said he understood that the death-rate had been cut in two, and that yellow fever was no longer {336} epidemic there, but he understood also that the town was growing more and more like Hoboken, so that he scarcely dared go back to see it. The parable has a lesson that is well worth driving home for our people, for it emphasizes a notable lack of culture among the American people, which did not exist among the Spanish Americans, a lack which we did not realize until the last decade or two, though it is an important index of true culture. The hideous buildings that we have allowed ourselves to live in in America, and, above all, that we have erected as representing the dignity of city, and only too often even of state, together with the awful evidence of graft, whenever an attempt has been made to correct this false taste and erect something worthy of us, the graft usually spoiling to a very great extent our best purposes, proclaim an absence of culture in American life that amounts to a conviction of failure of our education to be liberal in the true sense of the word.