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Show IN HALF A CENTURY MORE. <br><br> The center of populations in the United States has, during the last ten years, shifted from Columbus, Ohio, to the Indiana boundary line; in a few decades more it will reach the Mississippi River. At the rate of increase prevailing during the present century, the country will, in 1920, contain between 150,000,000 and 160,000,000. This is only forty years hence, a space easily grasped by those who can remember "the Harrison Presidential campaign." Ten or twelve years more, equal to a look backward as far as the days of Jackson, nullification and the United States Bank, the country will be found to contain 200,000,000-equal to the present population of Europe exclusive of Russia, Austria and Turkey. <br><br> It is hard to imagine the changes in the social and commercial phases of the country which this population implies; the immense domestic trade, the large interior cities-Chicago larger than New York or Philadelphia, Cincinnati and St. Louis than Brooklyn, Boston and Baltimore; Cleveland, Detroit and, cities of that grade containing half a million of people. Already the New England and Middle States are falling behind the average rate of growth, and they will tend more and more to the stationary point, when their annual increase will be insignificant. <br><br> Under these circumstances, there is every reason to suppose that there will grow up in this central portion an immense city, perhaps more than one, which will be the great metropolis and distributing point of the continent. It may be Chicago. It may be, else, Kansas City, or some other point farther west. For, when this country contains two hundred millions of people, certainly when east of the Mississippi it begins to approach the density in European populations, its domestic commerce will be more important than [unreadable line] cities more important than its seaports. The metropolis will not be New York, but the central point of distribution and exchange. This is true of nearly every country and its metropolis the world over, and there is no good reason for doubting that it will prove true of the United States, London, Pairs, Rome, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, Pekin?, in modern days, Athens, Babylon, Bagdad [Baghdad], Palmyra, in ancient times, are or were all interior cities. It will attract, as they have attracted, the swarming multitude, the intelligent, the energetic, the pleasure-loving, the adventurers from the immense reservoir of populations around it. It may be less cosmopolitan, but it will be more American than the seaport cities, just as Paris is the most distinctively national Marseilles one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. New York socially, Boston intellectually, are already dominated to some extent by foreign influences, and are not likely to become less so in the future. They are already settling down into hard, fixed modes of thought and life. <br><br> The newspaper press of the different kinds of cities in the Untied States begins to faintly prophesy their respective tendencies. The press of Boston and New York is comparatively provincial. Almost wholly in its news, and mainly in its comments, it scarcely recognizes the existence of any interest west of the Alleghanies [Alleghenies]. If there is any striking characteristic in the New York press at all, its management and tone partake of the English type. On the other hand, the Chicago papers show on their very face that they are published at a central point. Every point of the compass is fully represented. Their drag net of enterprise is thrown over the whole continent. This will be the law of their future growth, and the law of the future growth of Chicago or whatever the great central metropolis may be. It is to be a vitalized, energetic, distinctively continental center of commerce, art, literature and amusement, and will suck into its whirling current of business and pleasure, the teeming millions which will then swarm in the great central States of the Union. - [Detroit Free Press. |