All these open spaces, all this green and the scent of flowers, give one the impression that everywhere the country is overflowing into the city. One hears the syrinx rather than the riveter, and Pan and Flora yet hold the field against Midas and Vulcan. Nowhere in London, with the exception of the Mall and perhaps one or two other instances, do we find any such planned architectural vistas as so delight the French. London, vast as a primeval forest, has just naturally grown without elaborate city planning, but unlike New York and the larger American cities it has managed to keep itself green and homelike and beautiful. Nature has not been[Pg 266] banished, but welcomed in a thousand nooks and corners prepared for her to enter. The difference seems to depend on national taste and a different scale of values. In America the sole “value” of a piece of city real estate is considered to be what it will yield when built upon, and every inch is made to produce as much as possible by building on it. Here—although, Heaven knows, London land is costly enough—open spaces, irises and daffodils, hawthorns and lawns, have their values also for the human life of the town. The Bank of England is at present erecting a huge new building for its needs, but it is being so constructed as to preserve the small patch of shaded green where daffodils bloom in gay disregard of the swirling traffic a few feet away in one of the most congested centers of the world. Imagine a great bank in Wall Street having a garden! Anyone who suggested it would be thought mad, but in London it is this sense of human values, in private properties as well as public parks, maintained in spite of the need and lure of money in the world’s most densely populated city, which again gives one a sense of its civilized attitude toward life. Yet another element in its civilization is the almost perfect quiet that reigns in it. As contrasted with the insane tooting of horns day and night in Paris and New York, one rarely hears a motor, and although these warm days the parks are filled with children and older persons of all grades of society, walking about or playing games, one never hears any such “catcalling,” yelling, and general racket as one would in American city parks with such masses of people. Civilization is of necessity a colossal compromise between impulses of self-expression in an individual and his strength of will in controlling such impulses as, indulged in by many others,[Pg 267] would make life less possible or agreeable for all. When one motorist, dashing through a street at night, gives vent to his self-expression by a shriek of his horn which awakens with a start perhaps a hundred people, he is a being who has not learned the very rudiments of civilization—that is, of harmonizing his own instincts with the good of all.