seaboard could boast of. During this period, New York, although larger in wealth and in population, was to a considerable degree dependent upon Boston for its communication with the Old World." This state of affairs lasted until 1848. Before that year the great Boston houses had begun to establish selling agencies in New York. The Skinners went there in 1846, the Lawrences in 1851, and other houses of necessity followed. Then came the California trade, which gave such an immense commercial impetus to New York, and from that epoch the fate of Boston seemed sealed. It was not that her growth was to stop. She was to grow and will grow yet more, grow, in all probability, quite as fast as growth is healthy, — but the nature of that growth was to change. It was not to be of varied nature and of well-balanced elements; the merchant and the manufacturer were no longer to move forward with equal steps; henceforth the city was to be more and more lop-sided; she was to become, in comparison with great, commercial, cosmopolitan New York, what Manchester was to London, or Lowell to herself. Her own children seemed to have lost their enterprise and their system, or rather to have transferred those qualities with grand results to other fields. They seemed to unite their energies to diminish her resources, or to cripple her strength. They built great railroads throughout the West, and managed them with incomparable skill, but those roads did not lead to Boston. They hurried their great selling agencies in hotter and hotter competition to New York, until the firm names alone remained in Boston, and seven eighths of their business was done by the branch houses; the steamships followed the business, and the shipping followed the steamships, and the wharves would have followed both, had they not, fortunately for Boston, been firmly planted in the rapidly rising mud of the harbor.

Still one channel of reviving prosperity was open to the city. The railroad system, once the most promising in the country, remained to it; Boston might yet be convenient and accessible, a ready place of import and export; and then general trade could hardly fail, some day, to revisit it. This, the one chance of salvation, was the chance most neglected of all. While New York was building railroad upon railroad, enlar

ging canals, ever opening fresh channels through which the wealth of the newly-developed West could be poured into her lap, Boston, with a lack of perception, a want of foresight, an absence of enterprise, and a superabundance of timidity, in sad contrast with the great promise of an earlier and brighter day, was satisfied with that single line of railroad track directly connecting her with the overflowing West, which she had with an enterprise of a wholly different character boldly constructed in 1837. The result need not be dwelt upon. Boston proved herself not worthy of success in the race, and she lost the prize. She did all she could to limit the field of her enterprise,to encourage her customers to go elsewhere, to prevent them from coming to her. Success in such efforts is not difficult to attain. That she has grown and prospered is evident; so have Lowell and Providence, and probably Newport and Salem. So also have New York and Chicago. Here are two kinds of growth. One commercial, well-balanced, and cosmopolitan, the other manufacturing, unequal, and provincial. Boston has increased and flourished, but its increase has been provincial. It is now the first, or perhaps second, city of the Lowell and Providence type in America, while thirty years ago, with less wealth and fewer inhabitants, what growth it had was the cosmopolitan growth of New York and London. So much for Boston thirty years since and now.

Meanwhile how has it fared with Chicago? Thirty years ago the Indians had just been carted away across the muddy prairie, and Chicago was a Western city of four thousand inhabitants. They were a sort of amphibious creatures, living in their prairie swamp on the shores of Lake Michigan, now wallowing in mud and now smothering in dust; without a railroad, without any particular trade, accumulating large imaginary fortunes by successful operations in corner lots, and suffering from attacks of chills and fever. It was a city of the Cairo or Eden style. But in the year 1837 corner lots were down; Chicago was dead, perhaps the deadest place in the whole broad land. The Chicagonese did not fail at the rate of one a day during those depressing six months, as did the business firms of Boston, because they all failed at once, and had

it over.

They did not sacrifice corner lots at a ruinous loss,

simply because no one could be induced to buy them at any price. The city was bankrupt; the State was bankrupt; work on the canals and railroads was suspended, and corner lots were valueless. Such in 1837 was the condition of the Queen of the West. At length the dawn of revival broke upon this dark night of depression. In 1838 the Chicago wheat trade began with a well-known transaction covering thirty-nine double bushels. In 1839 her cattle trade amounted to three thousand creatures; in 1840 the city had revived enough to finish the canal which connects the Chicago River with the Illinois, and which had been begun in 1836. In 1850 the city had a population of thirty thousand inhabitants, and at last was the fortunate centre of a railroad system comprising forty-two miles, all in successful operation. In 1853 came the crisis of her fate. In that year the Chicago and Galena Railroad, then open to Elgin, paid a dividend of eleven per cent, and "the truth took possession of the whole mind of Chicago, and became its fixed idea, that every acre with which it could put itself in easy communication must pay tribute to it forever. From that time there has been no pause and no hesitation; but all the surplus force and revenue of Chicago have been expended in making itself the centre of a great system of railroads and canals. . . . . The railroad system of which Chicago is a centre now includes eight thousand miles of track, and the railroad system of which Chicago is the centre embraces nearly five thousand miles of track."

Here then are two material records leading to two results. How different those results are any man can see who will glance over the columns of the daily press of the two cities, and observe the exultant tone of the one and the deprecatory tone of the other. The mystery of the difference is not difficult of solution. The one city has been in close sympathy with the material development of the age, the other has not. Both were surrounded by eager rivals; but while the one realized the value of the prize contended for, the other reposed, though not in content, on the laurels of earlier days. The material destiny of Chicago is now fixed. "Her vocation is to put every good acre in all that region within ten miles of a railroad, and to connect every railroad with a system of ship

canals terminating in the Mississippi and the Atlantic Ocean. That is, has been, and will be for many a year to come Chicago's work." Thus the young city of the West has instinctively appreciated the position and necessity of the country and the age; she has flung herself, heart, soul, and body, into the movement of her time; she has realized the great fact that steam has revolutionized the world, and she has bound her whole existence up in the great power of modern times. But for this, St. Louis might well have proved to her what New York has proved to Boston.

Not so Boston. That city, in spite of her wealth and prestige, her intrinsic worth and deserved reputation, her superficial cónceit and real cultivation, failed to solve the enigma,did not rise to the height of the great argument. The new era found her wedded to the old, and her eyes, dimmed with experiences of the past, could not credit the brilliant visions of the future. She promised well, but her career failed to come up to her promise. Her commerce has not increased. She no longer sends out her ships to every quarter of the globe. The warerooms of her manufacturers do not swarm with buyers from every part of the land. She has not opened new channels of intercourse with the West. She is not better known. She does not bear that proportional influence with the country now that she did then. She has lost much of her influence and all of her prestige. That steam intercourse with Europe which was planted with her twenty-five years ago has by no means flourished and waxed strong. Time now more than ever before is money, and Boston is still and must ever remain twenty-four hours nearer to Liverpool than is New York. A passage already quoted has shown how and why New York was through years to a degree dependent on Boston for her communications with Europe. Yet not ten, nor six, nor four steam packets for the Old World leave her docks now for one which did so twenty years ago. It is very well to explain this by vague reference to the operations of natural laws, and the principles of demand and supply. Do not those laws and those principles apply as well to Liverpool as to Boston? Boston once had a hold - not so strong a hold, but still a hold -on the Liverpool trade, as Liverpool had on the American

trade. The principles of trade and the operation of general laws have not drawn Liverpool to London, as they have drawn Boston to New York. The reason is obvious. Liverpool has remained convenient and accessible, and Boston has not. The American trade with Great Britain is more than one third of the whole foreign trade of this country, and Boston seems likely soon to lose the remnant of it which she still retains. Not so Liverpool. Her steam navigation with America has not passed to London. In the month of March, 1867, she cleared thirty-one steamers for America; and often on a single day fifteen ocean steamers will clear from New York, while Boston, until the present year, has still continued to receive and send out, as in 1847, her two Cunarders a month.

Sadly as Boston has failed in rising to an equality with the occasion, much as her sagacity has been at fault, little as she has appreciated her own situation amid the material movements of the day, she has not seen herself distanced in the race without abundance of lamentation. The whole country has witnessed her frantic efforts to recover lost ground, the superabundance of infallible remedies suggested as cures for her troubles, the spasmodic efforts with which she has partially followed out these abortive schemes. Most citizens of Boston can run over in memory since 1848 a long list of futile enterprises, the projectors of which promised from them wealth to themselves and a renewed commercial eminence to their city. The Western men, and the seductions necessary to be held out to induce them to flock to Boston rather than to gay New York, have for years been the favorite theme of the city press, and furnished strong argument for endless subscription lists. In 1852 the Western purchaser must have a theatre to beguile away his evenings, or he would not come to Boston. Forthwith an enormous barn was built, which Boston fills a dozen times a year, and ruins endless managers in doing it. Then, the theatre having failed to beguile the Western man from his New York haunts, trade-sales were hit upon. The denizen of the prairie could not resist the temptation of great auctions. This lasted a year or two, and then was heard of no more. Then came up the Southern man in place of the Western man, and lines of steamers were established to run to Richmond, to Charleston,