William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 2

But banks are banks, and clubs are clubs. A special beauty may be gained in one part of a city at the expense of others, as we have seen in Bloomsbury and Belgravia, when thousands on thousands of the poor were routed out of ricketty old lodgings to make room for New Oxford Street and Grosvenor Gardens. Such things occur in great cities without being signs of growth. The pulling-down of Paris, under Louis Napoleon, was no evidence of public health, but rather of a hectic glow and morbid appetite for change. flow are the ordinary houses in a city built? How are the masses lodged? These are the questions which a statesman and a moralist ought to ask. It is not enough to ask whether, behind these banks and palaces, lie Field Lanes and Fox Courts; it is of more importance to see how the average classes of mankind are housed.

In no place, either in America or out of it, have I seen such solid work-such means of purity and comfort — in the ordinary private houses, as in Philadelphia. There seem to be no sheds, no hovels,