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merchandise ; but nearly all the older European towns of impor- 

 tance, from which we have received the fashion of our present street 

 arrangements, were formed either to strengthen or to resist a pur- 

 pose involving the destruction of life and the plunder of merchandise. 

 They were thus planned originally for objects wholly different from 

 those now reckoned important by the towns which occupy the 

 same sites, and an examination of the slow, struggling process by 

 which they have been adapted to the present requirements of 

 their people, may help us to account for some of the evils un- 

 der which even here, in our large American towns, we are now 

 suffering. 



HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF EXISTING STREET 

 ARRANGEMENTS, FIRST STAGE. 



They were at the outset, in most cases, entrenched camps, in 

 which a few huts were first built, with no thought of permanence, 

 and still less with thought for the common convenience of their 

 future citizens. The wealth of their founders consisted chiefly in 

 cattle, and in the servants who were employed in herding and 

 guarding these cattle, and the trails carelessly formed among the 

 scattered huts within the entrenchments often became permanent 

 foot-ways which, in some cases, were subsequently improved in 

 essentially the same manner as the sidewalks of our streets now are, 

 by the laying upon them of a series of flat stones, so that walkers 

 need not sink in the mud. If the ground was hilly, and the grades 

 of the paths steep, stairs were sometimes made by laying thicker 

 slabs of stone across them. Convenience of communication on foot 

 was, of course, the sole object of such improvements. 



If, in these early times, any highways were more regularly laid 

 out, it was simply with reference to defence. For example, although 

 two nearly straight and comparatively broad-ways were early formed 

 in Paris, so that reinforcements could be rapidly transferred from 

 one gate to another when either should be suddenly attacked, no 

 other passages were left among the houses which would admit of the 

 introduction of wheeled traffic ; nor in all the improvements which 

 afterwards occurred, as the city advanced in population and wealth, 

 were any of the original pathways widened and graded sufficiently 

 for this purpose until long after America had been discovered, and 

 the invention of printing and of fire-arms had introduced a new era, 

 of social progress. 



The labor required for the construction of permanent town walls, 

 and the advantage of being able to keep every part of them closely 



