TENEMENT HOUSE REGULATION 195 



stitutes liberty are largely conventional. They vary with time 

 and place. They are different in different countries. Liberty, 

 proper liberty, to-day, may, under changing conditions, be- 

 come license to-morrow. I came home from Europe not long 

 since with a French friend, who had gone home to his native 

 country to take possession of his ancestral estates. He told 

 me of having found the trees grown up quite thickly around 

 his father's country home, and of the difficulties he had en- 

 countered in obtaining permission from the public authorities 

 to cut down some of them, which was finally only granted on 

 condition that he replant elsewhere. That his trees could 

 only be cut down with the consent of the public authorities, 

 and that he could properly be required to replant elsewhere as 

 a condition of obtaining that consent, seemed to him a part of 

 the eternal order of things. He no more questioned it in his 

 mind than we, who live in cities, question the propriety of ob- 

 taining from the city building department a permit to build, 

 based upon approval of our architect's plans. 



Lecky, in one of his later books, speaking of sanitary legis- 

 lation, says : "Few things are more curious than to observe how 

 rapidly, during the past generation, the love of individual 

 liberty has declined; how contentedly the English race are 

 committing great departments of their lives to the web of 

 regulations restricting and encircling them." It is not that 

 love of liberty has declined; it is that the English race are 

 meeting new conditions with the same genius with which they 

 have evolved their great system of common law. Living, as 

 most of them did a century ago, in separate houses, and in 

 small villages or towns, every man could build as he pleased 

 and could maintain his building as he pleased without seri- 

 ousl}^ endangering the liberty of his neighbors; but with the 

 steady movement of the population from the country to the 

 city, and the marvelous growth of cities, not only horizontally 

 but vertically, new conditions must be met, and the property 

 rights and liberty of one neighbor must be limited to protect 

 the property rights and liberty of another. If a man built an 

 isolated house in the country, without light or air for the bed- 

 rooms, and kept it in such filthy condition as to breed disease, 

 it is a fair question whether his liberty should be infringed by 



