on the subject that the question has almost passed from the stage of generalization to that of specialization and detail.

In the April number of the Atlantic Magazine of the present year an article commenting on Dr. Albert Shaw's recent work, entitled "Municipal government in Great Britain," says:

"The great fact in the social development of the white race at the close of the nineteenth century is the tendency all over the world to concentrate in great cities." Doubtless this is true; but it is not a new, or even a modern tendency, although, as we shall see, there is much in modern civilization which tends to increase and accentuato it. Still, when the earliest dawn of authentic history sheds its pale light on the impenetrable darkness which lies beyond, it shows us cities as large, as magnificent, as luxurious, as wicked, and apparently as old as any that the world has since known. The books speak of Babylon as the largest city the world has ever seen; but it was by no means the first, and may not have been the greatest even then. Nineveh, its great rival, Memphis, Thebes, Damascus, claiming to be the oldest of them all, Rome, in a later time, with its two or three millions of inhabitants, are but representatives of other cities by the thousands, perhaps larger and older than the largest and oldest here named, and are certainly sufficient to show that a tendency in men to live congregated together in large numbers is as old as anything that we know about the human race.

In our earliest literature, too, we find, apparently well fixed, some of the same prejudices against the city as a place for men to dwell in that now exist. These prejudices must have been already existing for a long time, and their influence must have been the subject of observation before even the possibly somewhat prejudiced people who did not live in cities should have arrived at such firmly settled conclusions in regard to their deleterious influence. Curiously enough, the prejudice appears in one of our earliest writings. These is no doubt that the writer of the Book of Genesis had what might be called an unfriendly feeling toward Cain. He gives him a bad character in every respect. He holds him up to the universal contempt of mankind, and visits him with the severest judgments of God. And, after he has said about him nearly every bad thing that he can think of, he adds as a climax to his enormities, "And Cain builded a city." Now, whether he meant to be understood that cities, having been first built by such an infamous scoundrel, had turned out to be very much what you might expect, or whether, the general character of cities having been already settled in his mind, it was adding one more black mark to Cain to mention this fact, is by no means clear; but this much is certain, that the writer was no admirer of cities, and that neither Cain nor cities were intended to derive any credit from his statement. From that day to this they have had their severe critics. They have been regarded as the breeding places of vice and the refuge of crime. Our own Jefferson-that is, Thomas, not Joseph-is said to have called them "ulcers on the body politic." Dr. Andrew D. White, in his address as president of this association delivered in 1891, says, "Our cities are the rotten spots in our body politic, from which, if we are not careful, decay is to spread throughout our whole country; for cities make and spread opinions, fashions, ideals." The poet Cowley says, "God the first garden made, and the first city Cain.' And other writers with the same feelings have used language of a similar import, dictated by the warmth of their temperament, the range of their vocabulary, and the power of their rhetoric.

Prof. Max Nordau, who has lately shown us in a large octavo of 650 pages how we are all hastening on to certain destruction-a conclusion which I am not disposed to combat-or perhaps I might more modestly say, as the late President Woolsey is reported to have said to Daniel A. Pratt, the great American traveler, when he laid before him some rather startling propositions, that I would rather give him a dollar than to attempt to point out the fallacy in his argument-Mr. Nordau, after quoting high authority to show how the human race is poisoning itself with alcohol, tobacco, opium, hasheesh, arsenic, and tainted food, says:

"To these noxious influences, however, one more may be added, which Morel [the authority he has just quoted] has not known or has not taken into consideration; namely, residence in large towns. The inhabitant of a large town, even the richest, who is surrounded by the greatest luxury, is continually exposed to unfavorable influences which diminish his vital powers far more than what is inevitable. He breathes an atmosphere charged with organic detritus; he eats stale, contaminated, adulterated food; he feels himself in a state of constant nervous excitement, and one can compare him without exaggeration to the inhabitant of a marshy district. The effect of a large town on the human organism offers the closest analogy to that of the Maremma, and its population falls victim to the same fatality of degeneracy and destruction as the victims of malaria. The death rate in a large town is more than a quarter greater than the average for the entire population. It is double that of the open country, though in reality it ought to be less, since in a large town the most vigorous ages predominate, during which the mortality is lower than in infancy

and old age. And the children of large towns who are not carried off at an early age suffer from the peculiar arrested development which Morel has ascertained in the population of fever districts. They develop more or less normally until they are 14 or 15 years of age, are up to that time alert, sometimes brilliantly endowed, and give the highest promise. Then suddenly there is a standstill. The mind loses its facility of comprehension; and the boy, who only yesterday was a model scholar, becomes an obtuse, clumsy dunce, who can only be steered with the greatest difficulty through his examinations. With these mental changes bodily modifications go hand in hand. The growth of the long bones is extremely slow or ceases entirely, the legs remain short, the pelvis retains a feminine form, certain other organs cease to develop, and the entire being presents a strange and repulsive mixture of uncompleteness and decay. Now, we know how in the last generation the number of inhabitants of great towns increased to an extraordinary degree. At the present time an incomparably larger portion of the whole population is subjected to the destructive influences of large towns than was the case fifty years ago. Hence the number of victims is proportionately more striking, and continually becomes more remarkable. Parallel with growth of large towns is the increase in the number of the degenerate of all kinds, criminals, lunatics, and the higher degenerates of Magnan; and it is natural that these last should play an ever more prominent part in endeavoring to introduce an ever greater element of insanity into art and literature."

Many people think Nordau like the patient in the asylum. He thinks everybody crazy except himself. But Dr. Walter B. Platt, in a paper read before this association in 1887, points out certain dangers to the constitution to which every dweller in cities is of necessity exposed from physical causes, specially mentioning disuse of the upper extremities, the exposure to incessant noise and its cumulative effect on the whole nervous system, the jarring of the brain and spinal cord by a continual treading upon unyielding pavements. And he adds that good authorities assert that there are very few families now living in London who with their predecessors have resided there continuously for three generations; but he excepts from the operations of these deleterious influences those whose circumstances are such as to enable them to spend a considerable portion of each year in the country.

Dr. Grace Peckham, in a paper read before this association in 1885, says: "However it was arrived at, the census of 1880 shows that the infant mortality of cities in this country is twice as great as that of the rural districts."

Everyone who has taken an interest in Mr. Charles Loring Brace's great work in the city of New York knows that his firm belief was that the salvation of the city poor depended on getting the surplus into country homes; and few men have been more competent to judge or more ready to look at all sides of a case than he. The literature of the slums is full of every human horror; and it would seem as if any change must be for the better.

Dr. Josiah Strong, in that vigorous presentation of the dangers of our American civilization entitled Our Country, says: "The city has become a serious menace to our civilization, because in it each of our dangers is enhanced and all are localized. It has a peculiar attraction for the immigrant. In 1880 our fifty principal cities contained 39.3 per cent of our German population and 45.8 per cent of our Irish. Not only does the proportion of the poor increase with the growth of the city, but their condition becomes more wretched. Dives and Lazarus are brought face to face." Speaking of Dives and Lazarus, has Dives had what you might call quite fair play? Even Judas has had his apologists, but I do not remember ever to have seen any speculation as to what would have become of Lazarus if he had not been fed from Dives's table. Doubtless he preferred that to the poorhouse or even to tramping; and from all accounts, he was not exactly the sort of person you would choose for a parlor boarder. This, however, is a mere passing comment, and, I trust, will not involve me in any theologic discussion; but I do like to see even the devil have his due.

The feature of cities which is perhaps at present attracting more attention than any other is their misgovernment. Dr. Strong begins a paragraph thus: "The government of the city is by a 'boss' who is skilled in the manipulation of the 'machine,' and who holds no political principles except for revenue only."" If a foreigner were to read that sentence he would infer that "boss" was the English for the chief magistrate of a city, but we know so well just what it means that it scarcely attracts our attention.

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One would think after reading all this about the evils of cities from the time of Cain to the last New York election, or, rather, let us say, to the last but one-and especially when we must admit that we know everything that is said to be true, and that even then not the half nor the tenth part has been told, and we are almost driven to the conclusion that nothing short of the treatment applied to Sodom and Gomorrah will meet the necessities of the case-that every sane man and woman should flee without stopping for the open country; and the women especially should be careful

how they look behind them, and be sure to remember Lot's wife, and nothing should induce them to turn their faces cityward again.

Now, in spite of all this precisely the reverse is true, and, while there has always been a strong tendency in humanity cityward, this nineteenth century sees it intensified beyond all former experience. Statistics do not make interesting public reading, but from Dr. Strong's valuable work, where there are many, we take a few in support of our position:

"The population of this country as divided between city and country was, in 1790, omitting fractions, country 97 per cent, city 3 per cent; in 1840, country 91 per cent, city 9 per cent; in 1890, country 71 per cent, city 29 per cent; and the rate of increase is itself all the while increasing."

In 1856 Chicago had a population of 90,000. In 1895 it is supposed to have 1,500,000, with several outlying districts not yet heard from. In this classification, which is taken from the United States census, towns of 8,000 and over rank as cities, while the rest is country. Of course a line must be drawn somewhere for the purpose of statistics, but many think it might more properly have been drawn at 5,000, which would largely increase the city percentage. Dr. Strong also quotes this statement: That in the rural districts of Wayne County, N. Y., there are 400 unoccupied houses, and much other valuable statistical information of a similar character. Professor Nordau also has many statistics of various European countries, all to the same purport. But the general fact of the enormous increase of the city at the expense of the country is so notorious that it needs no proof. Let us consider some of its causes.

It is well to notice, and perhaps here as well as anywhere, that, while in all countries the influence of the city has been great, it has not been equally great in all. Rome was the Roman Empire. Carthage was Phoenicia. Paris to-day is France. But London, big as it is, is not England; Madrid is not Spain, and, certainly, Berlin is not Germany. In all these cases there is a power and a public opinion, a consensus of thought, a moral, political, and social influence in the country as a whole, which does not look to nor depend upon the city as its maker, leader, and guide. It is easier to see and feel this fact than to analyze and explain it. Probably the same reasons or kinds of reasons do not apply in every case, but each has its own, some of which are easy to find and others too deep and elusive to be discovered. Accidents of early history, geographical relations, the temper and idiosyncrasies of a people, and other influences, some broader and some more subtle, all combine to fix the relative position and importance of the great city and the country or the lesser town. Speaking of Constantinople, Mr. Frederic Harrison says:

"There is but one city of the world of which it can be said that for fifteen centuries and a half it has been the continuous seat of empire under all the changes of race, institutions, customs, and religions. And this may be ultimately traced to its incomparable physical and geographical capabilities."

In England more than in any other country, as it seems to me, country life is regarded as the normal condition of a fully developed man; and even then it is only those who keep themselves polished by frequent attrition with city life that accomplish much for themselves or their fellow-men. But probably the lesson to be drawn is that a life where both the city and country have a part develops the highest form of manhood and is the end to be striven for.

Ancient cities owed their existence to a variety of causes. Probably safety and convenience were, at the bottom, the reasons for aggregating the population; but any special city frequently owed its existence, so far as appears, to the mere caprice of a ruler as a passing fancy-though he may have had his reasons—sometimes, doubtless, to military considerations, and sometimes perhaps to accident, or to migration, or the results of natural causes, geographical or commercial. It was not until the Middle Ages that the industrial town was evolved. But the modern town seems wholly industrial in its raison d'être; it is therefore governed by the laws which govern industrial progress.

Buckle says: "Formerly the richest countries were those in which nature was most bountiful. Now the richest countries are those in which man is most active." (He also adds, although perhaps it has no special significance in this connection, that "it is evident that the more men congregate in great cities the more they will become accustomed to draw their material of thought from the business of human life and the less attention they will pay to those proclivities of nature which are a fatal source of superstition.")

Aside from all questions of mutual defense and protection and mutual helpfulness in various ways and industrial convenience, doubtless one of the very strongest of forces in the building of the city is the human instinct of gregariousness. This underlies ancient as well as modern, military as well as industrially founded aggregations, and the hamlet or the village as well as the city. But there is always a craving to get where there are more people. The countryman, boy or girl, longs for the village, the villager for the larger town, and the dweller in the larger town for the great city; and, having once gone, they are seldom satisfied to return to a place of less size.

In short, whatever man may have been or may be in his prognathous or troglodyte condition, ever since we have known much about him he has been highly gregarious, even under unfavorable conditions.

As long ago as 1870 Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted, in a paper read before this association, said, “There can be no doubt that in all our modern civilization, as in that of the ancients, there is a strong drift townward;" and he quotes the language of an intelligent woman whose early life had been spent in one of the most agreeable and convenient farming countries in the United States: "If I were offered a deed of the best farm I ever saw, on condition of going back to the country to live, I would not take it. I would rather face starvation in town."

The life of the great city would seem to bear hardest of all on the very poor, and the country, or at least suburban, life to present the strongest attraction, by contrast, to this class. Pure air, plenty of water, room for children to play, milk on which to feed them, room to sleep, wholesome food for adults-these things, almost impossible to the poor in the city, are nearly all of easy attainment in the country; yet the overmastering desire for a city life seems to be stronger with this class than with any other. Perhaps you are familiar with the story of the kind lady who found a widow with a great family of children living in the depths of poverty and dirt in the city, and moved them all to a comfortable country home where, with a moderate amount of exertion, they were sure of a living. At the end of six weeks her country agent reported that the family had suddenly disappeared, no one knew where. Going back to the neighborhood of their old haunts, she found them all reestablished there in the same circumstances of dirt and destitution as of old. "Why did you leave that comfortable home and come back here?" was her astonished inquiry. "Folks is more company nor sthoomps, anyhow," was the answer. Poor food, and little of it, dirt and discomfort, heat and cold-all count as nothing in competition with this passion of gregariousness and desire for human society, even where that means more or less of a constant fight as the popular form of social intercourse.

Doubtless one of the most potent factors in the modern growth of cities has been the immense improvement in the facilities for travel, which has been such a marked characteristic of the last half century. But, after all, what is this but saying that it has been made easier for people to go where they wished to be? Facilities for travel make it as easy to get from city to country as from country to city; but the tide, except for temporary purposes, all sets one way. Nevertheless, there is no question that this ease of locomotion has been availed of to a surprising extent in transporting each year in the summer season a very large portion, not of the rich alone, but of nearly every class, not only from our great cities but from our moderately large towns, to the woods and lakes and seashore for a time. The class of people who, fifty years since, lived in the same house the year round, without thought of change, now deem a six or twelve weeks' residence in the country a vital necessity; and this fact is a great alleviation and antidote to some of the unfavorable influences of city life.

All modern industrial life tends to concentration as a matter of economy. It has long been remarked that the best place to establish or carry on any kind of business is where that business is already being done. For that reason we see different kinds of manufactures grouping themselves together-textiles in one place, metals in another; and, of the textiles, cottons in one place, woollens in another; and of the metals, iron in one place, copper in another, and so on. The reason of this is obvious. In a community where a certain kind of business is carried on the whole population unconsciously become, to a certain extent, experts. They know a vast deal more of it than people who have had no such experience. Every inan, woman, and child in a fishing village is much superior in his or her knowledge of fish, bait, boats, wind, and weather to the inhabitants of inland towns. This is true of all the arts, so that, besides the trained hands which may be drawn upon when needed, there is a whole population of half-trained ones ready to be drawn upon to fill their places. Then, every kind of business is partly dependent on several other kinds. There must be machine makers, blacksmiths, millwrights, and dealers in supplies of all sorts. Where there is a large business of any kind these subsidiary trades that are supported by it naturally flock around it; whereas in an isolated situation the central establishment must support all these trades itself or go a considerable distance when it needs their assistance. Fifty or sixty years ago small manufacturing establishments in isolated situations and on small streams were scattered all through the Eastern States. The condition of trade at that time rendered this possible. Now they have almost wholly disappeared, driven out by economic necessity; and their successors are in the cities and large towns.

If you will examine any city newspaper of fifty or sixty years ago, you will find frequent advertisements for boys as clerks in stores; and almost always they read "one from the country preferred." Now you never see this. Why is it? I think mainly because the class of boys which these advertisements were expected to attract from the country are no longer there. This was really a call for the

well-educated boys of the well-to-do farmers of native stock, who thought they could better themselves by going to a city. They went, and did better themselves; and those who stayed behind fell behind. The country people deteriorated, and the country boy was no longer for business purposes the equal of the boy who had been trained in city ways. Country boys still go to the city; but they are not advertised for, and have to find their own way.

Our great civil war compelled us to find out some way in which to replace the productive power of a million men sent into the field and suddenly changed from producers into consumers. Their places had to be filled in the lines of agriculture and of all the mechanic arts, in the counting room, in the pulpit, at the bar, and everywhere else where a soldier was to be found. A hundred thousand of these places, more or less, in shops, in mechanic industries, in counting rooms, in the medical profession, even at the pulpit and the bar, were filled with women; and the deficit left by the remainder of the million was supplied by newly invented machinery to do their work. The result was that when the war was over a million of men, or as many as came back, found their places filled. They were no longer needed. In all rural occupations this was especially the case; and, being driven out the country by want of work, they flocked to the city as the most likely place to find it. The disturbing influence in financial, economic, and industrial matters of this sudden change of a million men from producers to consumers and back again to producers, followed as it was soon after by the disturbing influences of the Franco-Prussian war, have never been given their due weight by students of sociology.

We must remember, too, that cities as places of human habitation have vastly improved within half a century. About fifty years ago neither New York nor Boston had public water, and very few of our cities had either water or gas, and horse railroads had not been thought of. When we stop to think what this really means in sanitary matters, it seems to me that the increase of cities is no longer a matter of surprise.

A few years since the great improvement of the lift or clevator added probably 10 per cent actually, and much more than that theoretically, to the possibilities of population on a given amount of ground; and now within a very recent period three new factors have been suddenly developed which promise to exert a powerful influence on the problems of city and country life. These are the trolley, the bicycle, and the telephone. It is impossible at present to foresee just what their influence is to be on the question of the distribution of population; but this much is certain, that it adds from 5 to 15 miles to the radius of every large town, bringing all this additional area into new relations to business centers. Places 5 or 10 miles apart and all the intervening distances are rendered accessible and communicable for all the purposes of life as if they were in the next street. Already the bicycle has done more toward directing attention and effort to the improvement of ordinary highways than all that has been done before since the days of Indian paths. It is affecting the legislation of the country on the subject of roads. When we think of what this minimizing of distance means we can not help seeing that its influence must be immense, but just what no man can foretell. It is by such apparently unimportant, trifling, and inconspicuous forces that civilization is swayed and molded in its evolutions and no man can foresee them or say whither they lead.

Cities, as desirable places of human habitation, seem to have touched low-water mark-as did almost everything else—in that miserable period of comparative cessation in human progress known to us in European history as the "Dark" or "Middle Ages." Babylon had its gardens and its perennial streams of pure water running through its streets; Damascus, its wonderful groves and gardens. Old Rome had its mighty aqueducts traversing the country like lines of pillared temples and bringing the full flow of the mountain streams into the heart of the city, where it irrigated the great gardens and pleasure grounds of the wealthy nobles, and sported in fountains for everybody, and furnished baths for the benefit of the inass of the people. And many other large cities on both shores of the Mediterranean were but a duplicate of Rome. But, when the people had in some way lost their grip, either through luxury or gluttony or the idleness which came of having no great wars on hand, or whatever it may have been, their waterworks fell out of repair, their baths went to ruin, the Goths came and finished up the job, and the last state of that people was worse, very much worse, than the first. London, which had its rise and great growth in these days of ignorance and darkness, was a great straggling village, without a vestige of sanitary appliances, without decent roads, infested by robbers, and altogether such a place as pestilence delights in and only fire can purify. Mr. Frederic Harrison is so impressed with this that he seems to think the Christianity of those days largely responsible for the increase of dirt that was contemporaneous with its early growth, and that, in its stern repression of luxurious living and care for the body, it affords a very unfavorable contrast to the cleanlier and more sanitary ways of the earlier time. Probably this is not without much truth; but there were other forces at work affecting alike both saints and sinners. Yet in these medieval cities,