Now, to increase the population of a town and to raise the nominal values in ground rents is almost a moral imperative in our American communities. That is why our zoning laws, which attempt to regulate the use of land and provide against unfair competition in obtaining the unearned increment, almost universally leave a loophole through which the property owners, by mutual consent, may transform the character of the neighborhood for more intensive uses and higher ground rents. All our city planning, and more and more our architecture itself, is done with reference to prospective changes in the value of real estate. It is nothing to the real estate speculator that the growth of a city destroys the very purpose for which it may legitimately exist, as the growth of Atlantic City into a suburb of Broadway and Chestnut Street ruined its charm as a seaside fishing village. Sufficient unto the day is the evil he creates. Most of the important changes that must be effected in relation to industry and the land cannot be accomplished without departing from these dominant _mores_--from the customs and laws and uneasy standards of ethics which we carry over from the days of our continental conquest. The pioneer inheritance of the miner, coupled with the imperial inheritance of the hunter-warrior, out for loot, lie at the bottom of our present-day social structure; and it is useless to expect any vital changes in the milieu of architecture until the miner and the hunter are subordinated to relatively more civilized types, concerned with the culture of life, rather than with its exploitation and destruction. I am aware that the statement of the problem in these elementary terms will seem a little crude and unfamiliar in America where, in the midst of our buzzing urban environment, we lose sight of the underlying primitive reality, or--which is worse--speak vaguely of the “cave-man” unleashed in modern civilization. I do not deny that there are other elements in our makeup and situation that play an important part; but it is enough to bring forward here the notion that our concern with physical utilities and with commercial values is something more than an abstract defect in our philosophy. On the contrary, it seems to me to inhere in the dominant occupations of the country, and it is less to be overcome by moralizing and exhortation, than to be grown out of, by taking pains to provide for the ascendancy and renewal of the more humane occupations.