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New York, in spite of her magnificent harbor, suffered from a mistake of the geologic forces. A glance at the map shows that the Great Lakes were meant to drain into the Hudson; and their waters still protest, as they thunder down Niagara, against an unnatural diversion to an estuary frozen one half the year. To remedy the mistake of nature, the state of New York constructed the Erie canal, finished in its first form in 1825; and the astonishing growth of the city is the fruit of that undertaking. Philadelphia, Washington, and Richmond vainly tried to imitate this triumph. But Baltimore rivaled it by the early construction of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

The effect of our railroad system has been to make available the best harbors, wherever found, and to make large areas of rich country tributary to the cities upon them. Boston could scarcely live from New England products alone. New York depends for daily bread on Ohio, Michigan, and Minnesota. Of the six largest cities in the country, five are the larger Atlantic ports, - Boston, New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Baltimore; and they are among the most distant from the center of food supply. The other city of the six, Chicago, illustrates another great change in modern, as compared with ancient, commercial conditions: Chicago is a great trade center. Its site was determined by the fact that a little creek made the most convenient harbor at the head of Lake Michigan; railroads diverged from it, railroads were built to it. It has become a distributing point for the states to the west of it. St. Paul and Minneapolis in the Northwest, St. Louis and Kansas City in the Southwest, owe their growth to the same cause. Their site was determined by their position on rivers, but the river trade is now of small importance. The present growth of the interior cities is due to the network of connecting railways.

In the series of commercial reasons just discussed for the growth of cities, there is evident a tendency to concentrate trade. The few places which combine good harbors or a central situation with lake or river navigation, with established trade

1 Except, of course, the trade down the river from St. Louis to New Orleans. Even this route is now paralleled by a railroad.

routes, with artificial means of transit, and with cheap coal, must more and more gather to themselves foreign and internal commerce. It is for these reasons that New York is and must always be the chief city in the western hemisphere.

The coast cities, however, owe only a part of their prosperity to their situation as points of exchange for foreign products. We sometimes lose sight of the fact that all our greater commercial cities are also great manufacturing cities. The first nine cities in population are the first nine in value of manufactured products. New York in 1880 led in manufactures of clothing. Philadelphia, second only to Lynn in shoes, surpassed Lawrence in mixed textile goods. It is not merely that these cities manufacture more because they have more people : they have more people because they manufacture to advantage. When manufacturing began on a large scale in the United States certain inland cities grew up, because they had an advan- · tageous water power. Rochester and Minneapolis, and especially the towns on the Connecticut and Merrimac, owe their prosperity to the shrewdness of men who caused water to fall in an orderly manner through their overshot and turbine wheels rather than tumultuously over rocks. It is a very singular fact that the advantage of water-power sites is at present very slight.

1 In 1900 the principal manufacturing centers were as follows:

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A high official in the Amoskeag Corporation said to be the largest concern engaged in textile manufacturing in the world -has said that if Manchester, New Hampshire, the seat of the works, were not already built, it would not be built for the sake of utilizing that important water power. There are many magnificent mill sites in the North Carolina mountains still unused and likely to be unused for many years. Where coal is cheap steam power is, on the whole, more convenient: hence the growth of Fall River, New Bedford, and Providence; hence, also, the possibility of manufacturing in the large coast and inland cities, in competition with the water powers. We all recognize that Pittsburg owes its prosperity to the soft coal near by; we less often reflect that Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York enjoy a similar advantage over the New England cities.

The success of manufactures and the consequent distribution of population into manufacturing cities depends, perhaps, less on the natural advantages of a place than on the skill and industry of the people. The great ease of transporting persons over large distances - an absolutely new thing in the history of the world makes it possible to mass skilled laborers in cities. The coast cities enjoy the advantage of receiving such laborers direct from abroad, and thus in many cases they have the first choice. There is a corresponding disadvantage. Almost all the immigrants into the United States land at one of four ports, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore; and these cities fail to sift into the country beyond some elements which cause them great perplexity.

For the prosperity of the country it is far less important that population should grow than that it should grow intelligent. In this respect the coast cities have some advantage. The people of great seaports have always the inestimable stimulus of direct intercourse with the world abroad and at home. Hence the population of New York is more likely to absorb new ideas than the population of Lowell or Cincinnati. In manufacturing cities, small and great, social and political problems are more difficult. Here it is possible to employ the labor of women and children; the taxes are more likely to fall upon the large

corporations, and to be spent by men who have no property. The manufacturing cities, even the smaller ones, are more closely peopled than those whose greater interest is commerce.

A distinct class of cities, numerous and populous, has grown up in the last thirty years, away from the coast and from water powers, but around mines of coal and metals, or near deposits of petroleum. Pittsburg and its neighbor Allegheny are the most important. Places like Altoona, Cumberland, Scranton, and Wheeling are rapidly following them. Wherever there is coal manufactures spring up, and populous cities. Around other mines have grown sometimes strange and phenomenal places. Pithole, Pennsylvania, once a ragged, unpromising hill farm, became a city of thirty thousand people; and a few years later its handsome brick hotels and banks were inhabited by two people, and its railroad was torn up. A similar fate seems likely to overtake Virginia City, Nevada, and may possibly overtake Leadville.

In addition to the geographical reasons which have just been enumerated, there are certain other physical causes which assist the aggregation of people in a particular spot. That place which lies near a good water supply has a better chance of growth; a city which is easily drained ought to be more healthy; and a city which has a beautiful site, well improved, and a system of parks, attracts people of leisure. These causes have a smaller influence than they deserve: Philadelphia has now more than a million of people whose chief drink is Schuylkill water, and a part of whom grow up in spite of surface drainage. On the other hand, cities with fewer natural advantages cheerfully spend large sums on aqueducts or systems for pumping sewage. The less fortunately situated cities have often the best water and the best pleasure grounds. It is almost inconceivable that of all the wealthy cities on the Atlantic coast, not one has a water-front park of any size. The growth of the population has been unexpected to itself; and the inestimable privilege of a beautiful sea front has forever passed away. With the excep tion of Washington, Chicago, and Boston, hardly any city is now making adequate provision for parks for the next generation.

One of the causes which had most effect upon the growth of ancient and mediæval cities has very little operation in the United States. Corinth, Perugia, Augsburg, were little independent states. Syracuse, Florence, or Nuremberg could, on occasion, put an army of fifty thousand men into the field. The city was the unit of political life. Cities grew because the people were freer there than in the country. No such tendency has ever shown itself in America. Beyond a few angry suggestions, during the Civil War, that New York City be created into a separate state, there has been no attempt to make a city a commonwealth; no one moves from Boston to Philadelphia to escape a tyrant's rule; no county Democrat is exiled because Tammany has the upper hand; the cities are subordinated to the states. It is hard to see how it could be otherwise; but that dependence upon the state has brought a danger into our municipal system: the well-meaning people of the cities have come to look to the state government as a deus ex machina; they expect more from a change of charter than from a change of heart. It is probable that if the people of New York City were left to themselves, and could get no relief from Albany, they would have to-day a better, cleaner, and more economical government; and that the much more satisfactory government of Boston would be improved if the responsibility for it were thrown wholly upon the Bostonians.

When a city is once started, it is likely to grow from the mere force of gravitation. It is more than a figure of speech to use the terms which suggest the superior attractiveness of city life. What else is "politics" than what the people of the wóλs do? What is the "urbane" man but the dweller in the urbs, and the "pagan" but the unconverted dweller in the fields? Nor is it the higher and more intelligent class which is most attracted by city life: where one person is drawn to a city by schools, churches, concerts, libraries, and theaters, five are drawn by the excitement and stir and activity of a city. One of the greatest problems of modern times is how to get people out of the exhausting or despairing life of cities into the quiet and comfort of villages. And while the country life of Newport,

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