necessary to signalize will be seen to be only the attributes
of modern life in their most exaggerated phase.

To begin with, in studying the United States, we are no longer dealing
with a single city, or with small groups of cities. The city as a
political unit, in the antique sense, has never existed among us, and
indeed can hardly be said now to exist anywhere. The modern city is
hardly more than a great emporium of trade, or a place where large
numbers of people find it convenient to live huddled together; not a
sacred fatherland to which its inhabitants owe their highest allegiance,
and by the requirements of which their political activity is limited.
What strikes us here is that our modern life is diffused or spread out,
not concentrated like the ancient civic life. If the Athenian had been
the member of an integral community, comprising all peninsular Greece
and the mainland of Asia Minor, he could not have taken life so easily
as he did.

Now our country is not only a very large one, but compared to its vast
territorial extent it contains a very small population. If we go on
increasing at the present rate, so that a century hence we number four
or five hundred millions, our country will be hardly more crowded than
China is to-day. Or if our whole population were now to be brought east
of Niagara Falls, and confined on the south by the Potomac, we should
still have as much elbow-room as they have in France. Political
economists can show the effects of this high ratio of land to
inhabitants, in increasing wages, raising the interest of money, and
stimulating production. We are thus living amid circumstances which
are goading the industrial activity characteristic of the last two
centuries, and notably of the English race, into an almost feverish
energy. The vast extent of our unwrought territory is constantly
draining fresh life from our older districts, to aid in the
establishment of new frontier communities of a somewhat lower or less
highly organized type. And these younger communities, daily springing
up, are constantly striving to take on the higher structure,--to
become as highly civilized and to enjoy as many of the prerogatives of
civilization as the rest. All this calls forth an enormous quantity
of activity, and causes American life to assume the aspect of a
life-and-death struggle for mastery over the material forces of that
part of the earth's surface upon which it thrives.

It is thus that we are