dds to the stimulus of city
life and gives it for young and fresh nerves a peculiar attractiveness.
The lure of great cities is perhaps a consequence of stimulations which
act directly upon the reflexes. As a type of human behavior it may be
explained, like the attraction of the flame for the moth, as a sort of
tropism.

The attraction of the metropolis is due in part, however, to the fact
that in the long run every individual finds somewhere among the varied
manifestations of city life the sort of environment in which he expands
and feels at ease; finds, in short, the moral climate in which his
peculiar nature obtains the stimulations that bring his innate qualities
to full and free expression. It is, I suspect, motives of this kind
which have their basis, not in interest nor even in sentiment, but in
something more fundamental and primitive which draw many, if not most,
of the young men and young women from the security of their homes in the
country into the big, booming confusion and excitement of city life. In
a small community it is the normal man, the man without eccentricity or
genius, who seems most likely to succeed. The small community often
tolerates eccentricity. The city, on the contrary, rewards it. Neither
the criminal, the defective, nor the genius has the same opportunity to
develop his innate disposition in a small town that he invariably finds
in a great city.

Fifty years ago every village had one or two eccentric characters who
were treated ordinarily with a benevolent toleration, but who were
regarded meanwhile as impracticable and queer. These exceptional
individuals lived an isolated existence, cut off by their very
eccentricities, whether of genius or of defect, from genuinely intimate
intercourse with their fellows. If they had the making of criminals, the
restraints and inhibitions of the small community rendered them
harmless. If they had the stuff of genius in them, they remained sterile
for lack of appreciation or opportunity. Mark Twain's story of _Pudd'n
Head Wilson_ is a description of one such obscure and unappreciated
genius. It is not so true as it was that--

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its fragrance on the desert air.

Gray wrote the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" before the existence of
the modern city.

In the city many of these divergent types now find a milieu in which for
good or for ill their dispositions and talents parturiate and bear