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Show WARNING TO AMERICAN" Lift Seen In Congestion, Uglines6 and Discomforts Dis-comforts of the Average English Eng-lish City. If the English city presents in its congestion, its ugliness, its discomforts, discom-forts, a horrible warning to American Ameri-can life, experiments like that at Hampstead present a hope and an inspiration in-spiration and a way of avoiding the urban evils which followed In England the mad deluge of the Industrial revolution. revo-lution. For the chief value of building build-ing beauty Into the collective life of a city is that thus the ideas and principles which animate that beauty are given the most effective and dramatic dra-matic form. Every one can feel the charm of open spaces, of effective vistas vis-tas and the harmonious grouping of buildings; a village like Hampstead attracts immediate and widespread attention, at-tention, and hecomes the leaven which leavens a broad lump. Though St is the external form and not the Inner spirit and motive which are being copied, already In the countryside about the village are to be seen the Inspiration of the model; new building build-ing estates are being developed in the frankest Imitation of the Hampstead principles, while pioneer rows of un-regenerated un-regenerated brick villas stand tenant-less, tenant-less, unable to ccmpete with the new idea. And If a village competed on these principles can permeate its own vicinity so quickly and so completely, complete-ly, it almost guarantees itself as a model and Inspiration for the builders build-ers of the cities which men of the twentieth century will find fit to live In. Randolph S. Bourne, in the Atlantic |