OCR Text |
Show pavements of the city than they would of emigrating to the cold and cheerloss moon. Dccpite their pessimistic warnings the cityward tendency is sure to increase. But that need not alarm us, for while the centripetal movement continues we have assurances of prosperity. , There is nothing more certain than that urban growth, in all times and in all lands, has marked the periods, of advancement. When men cease to build cities retrogression at once begins. Countries that have no cities, or whose cities do not grow, are low in the scale of civilization or in a decadent state. They contribute nothing noth-ing to the sum total of human progress. UREAN GROWTH. The remarkable increase of the population of cities of the third and fourth classes, already reported by the Census Bureau, says the Chronicle, reveals the phenomenon of urban growth which was. so striking a feature of the decade 18S0-1900 was even more pronounced during the past ten years. . . Cases in which the growth of cities has exceeded 60 per cent during the past ten years have been announced, and there is reason to believe that many others will be reported. When the list of cities with a population exceeding 50,000 is completed com-pleted it will be much longer than that of 1900, and it will em-brace em-brace the names of growing and prosperous places now unfamiliar to the mass of the people. About the only drawback that will result from the increase will be that experienced by the children in the public schools, who are expected to lean by rote the names of American cities no matter how many of them there may be. But that will not keep some people from fussing. It i3 reasonable reason-able to expect that the census figures will have a tendency to renew the lamentations over the desertion of the land which we hear at rgularly recurring intervals. Urban growth, is a subject particularly congenial to that growing class the members of which think they are performing a duty when they are prating about the simple life, and the necessity of getting back tcf it if the country is to be saved from going to the "bow-wows." The sincerity of such talk may be gauged by the fact that most of those who indulge in it would no more think of abandoning the |