the cause of Liberty in the very vestibule and entrance chamber of the Republic. For all round the world the shame of New York darkens the sombre shade which encompasses the oppressed and gladdens with evil joy the heart of the oppressor.

STATUE OF NATHAN HALE.
City Hall Park, New York.

THE GRIDIRON STREETS OF THE NOISY CITY.
New York Post Office, Broadway.

CHAPTER II.

THE SECOND CITY IN THE WORLD.

A pandemonium of type-writing machines—of gigantic type-writing machines driven by demons who never tire—in some vast hall of Eblis. The clank of the type, the swish of the machine, the quick nervous ring of the bell, all indefinitely multiplied and magnified, fill the vast space with a reverberating clangour. This clangour continuously increases until its very vibrations seem to become clotted and fill the air with a sound that can be felt in every pore. It is like the pressure of an atmosphere so dense you can almost cut it with a knife, an atmosphere that is never still, but perpetually frets, and moans, and snarls with feverish unrest.

How many machines there must be to crowd the air with this million times multiplied misery of click and clang—ring-ring—ring-ring—and clang and click, that never stops, but rises and falls, rhythmless and rude, like the waves of a choppy sea on a rocky beach! Now and again through the infernal hubbub there pierces a dreadful wail,

How hot the air is! a temperature of the antechamber of Tophet. As the perspiration bursts in great beads of moisture from your brow, you hear the faint hum of circling wings, faint at first, but ever growing shriller and more acute—hiss, zip—as the invisible fiend circles round his prostrate victim. Hiss, zip, nearer, louder than before, audible clearly even above the metallic storm of the type-writing machines. And as the mosquito settles on your ear, you awake with a start and suddenly realise where you are.

You are not in even the outermost circles of Dante’s “Inferno.” You are trying to sleep in the heart of Central New York, in the midst of all the thunder and the rush and the roar of her million-crowded streets, along which surges as a restless tide the turbid and foaming flood of city life. The bells of the tramcars continually sounding, the weariless trampling of the ironshod hoofs over granite roadway, the whirling rumble of the wheels, the roar of the trains which on the elevated railways radiate uproar from a kind of infernal firmament on high, all suffused and submerged in the murmurous hum that rises unceasing from the hurrying footsteps in the crowded street, that inarticulate voice of New York—

And that dreadful shriek is the farewell of an Ocean liner sounding a sonorous note with stentorian lungs as it quits the wharf.

There is nothing like it in London. Chicago, with all its bustle, has nothing to compare to this harsh metallic clangour of struggle and strife—although there the mournful death-tolling bell on the locomotives which thread the streets supplies a note of pathos and of awe that is missing in the racket and roar of New York.

One grows used to it in time, just as after a few days you become used to the thrust and swirl of the screw which drives the liner across the sea. The great ship vibrates in every nerve of steel, and the state-room throbs with the thud of the engines. So the great city pulses with strenuous power, and in the multitudinous uproar of its streets we hear the sound of the friction of the two-million manpower engine which has made even Lesser New York one of the greatest driving forces of the American Republic.

It is a dynamo of the first order. And like the dynamo it is instinct with magnetic power. All great cities are great magnets, and New York is the greatest—but one—in the world.

The figures of the portentous growth of cities in our epoch recall the familiar story in the “Arabian Nights Entertainments” of the vessel which, sailing too near the Loadstone Mountain, was whelmed into sudden destruction. For the attraction of the loadstone was such that all the iron nails in the vessel were drawn out of their fastenings, and the timbers that were once a ship became mere flotsam and jetsam on the water. It is a wild and romantic fable in the mouth of the Princess Scheherazade; but it is grim reality in the world to-day. For the great city is to the rural population exactly what the Arabian loadstone mountain was to the heedless sailor who came within the range of its fascination. All the iron in the rural ship of State is attracted to the mighty Babylon. The men with iron in their blood, the girls whose pulses leap and tingle with the eager flush of adventure and ambition, desert the village and the farm to crowd the roaring mart and glaring street. The country is denuded of its most vigorous children. The city engulfs into its insatiate maw all those the brightest, the bravest, and the best.

The process goes on at an ever accelerating ratio. As Mr. Godkin has well observed:—

The percentage of urban to the total population of the United States, defining as urban all dwellers in cities of more than 8,000 population, was 3·35 in 1790. Forty years later it had doubled. But in 1860 it was 16·13, and in 1890, 29·12. But the growth of the cities which alone deserve the name of great has been still more phenomenal. In 1840—not sixty years ago—the ten greatest cities of America contained a total population of 711,652. To-day Brooklyn alone, which has been merged as a kind of suburb in Greater New York, has a population of a million, while the ten great cities, to be hereafter known as the Great Ten—New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco, Cincinnati, and Cleveland—had in 1890 a population of 6,660,402, and will have in 1900 a population of eight millions. In fifty years the population of the United States did not quadruple itself, for it only expanded in round numbers from 17 millions to 62½ millions. But the great cities increased themselves nearly ten-fold in the same period, and to-day they contain 11 per cent. of the whole population of the Union. The latest estimate of the present population of the country gives the cities 25 millions out of the 72 million citizens of the United States.

If one-third of the