Uncle Sam's last tabulation of his people holds within its maze of
figures a basis for prophecy, as well as a summary of the present, and
a comparison with the past. For those who are concerned with the making
of an intelligent citizenship, perhaps the striking and significant
fact is not the marvelous industrial development of the country, but
rather the amazing growth of the cities. It needs no searching analysis
to give emphasis to the sinister elements which are embodied in this
bare statement. It means an approach to that critical period in the
history of popular government when wise leadership and extension of
education alone can serve to avert threatened disruption. Upon the
people who are near to the soil will devolve the task of holding in
balance the restless and turbulent elements which now make up so large
a proportion of the dwellers in cities.
The modern growth of the city, with all that this movement in
population implies, must be reckoned with everywhere. Greater New York
has a population exceeding that of any state in the Union except its
own. Chicago has within its city limits more people than any of forty
states. The ten leading cities comprise together one-eighth of the
total population of the United States. If New York City and Chicago
and their conditions are extreme manifestations, it must be taken into
account that in perhaps not to exceed a quarter and at most a half
century, this growth cityward will be duplicated in every section of
the United States. There are now 58 cities in the United States each
counting more than 100,000 population, eight of them in excess of half
a million each; there are 180 cities more each counting from 25,000 to
100,000 inhabitants.
It is hard to realize the rate of urban growth. In spite of the opening
of vast tracts of land to be had almost for the asking, the total
town population has multiplied in the last hundred years from 3 to
approximately 50 per cent.
For the third or fourth time, the city is becoming the dominant
factor in the world's history. The city-states of Greece rose and
fell. Some of them became spoils of conquerors, others wasted from
internal causes. Corinth once exercised sovereignty of the seas, but
half a million of her population were slaves. When destroyed by the
Carthaginians, Agrigentum was said to number two millions of people.
Genoa, Venice, the cities of the Hanseatic league, played their brief
part in the commercial supremacy of their day. Rome once possessed
a population of one million and a quarter, but though circled by
beautiful villas and gardens, the common people lived congested in
buildings whose floors and apartments were divided among numerous
families. Famous writers have told us of the splendor and size of
hundred-gated Thebes and Babylon and Antioch and Ephesus. But if there
was splendor, there was vice; there was magnificence, but there dwelt
squalor as well. Beauty and opulence fattening on human misery could
not withstand famine, pestilence, and vice. The glories of the cities
on the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Tiber are but a memory. And unless
in the civic life of the modern city there is introduced an element
that shall embrace the common good, perhaps Macaulay's oft-cited
description of the New Zealander standing on the wreck of London bridge
surveying the ruins of St. Paul's may yet become historic instead of
merely prophetic.
It is perhaps but one of many evidences of the restlessness of the day
that the lure of the city beckons with attraction inescapable to the
youth of the countryside. Young men and young women who yield to the
fascination find too late that they have sought Dead Sea Fruit,
"Which charms the eye
But turns to ashes on the lips."
The refuges and jails and lazarets and foul places of the great cities
are filled with the derelicts of humanity who in less hectic atmosphere
might have led lives of usefulness and contentment. Much has been done
to give the life in the rural regions attractiveness and comfort; much
more remains to be done, and particularly in supplying educational
advantages, if the young men and women are to be made to feel that
their opportunities are no less than those to be secured in larger
cities of pulsing life. How wretchedly as yet this want has been met
in most states, those charged with the supervision of educational
activities can testify.
There are those who in the face of present-day economic conditions
contend that any attempt to stop the great trek cityward must prove as
futile as the back-to-the-soil movement has on the whole proved to be.
Any such admission bodes but ill for the future of this land. It means
that the number of men who feel an ownership in the land, in houses,
in the government must decrease. And therein lies a danger not to be
lightly disregarded.
Something of the dream and _Sehnsucht_ that comes to the dreaming
country boy, Robert Louis Stevenson has pictured with his wonder touch
in his idyl of the miller's boy. Something, too, he has suggested in
his ending of the story: