or shed at four
cross-roads is dignified with the title. We believe it was Samuel
Dexter, the pattern of Webster, who, on hanging out his shingle in a
New England village, where a tavern, a schoolhouse, a church, and a
blacksmith's shop constituted the whole settlement, gave as a reason,
that, having to break into the world somewhere, he had chosen the
weakest place. He would have tried a new Western city, had they then
been in fashion, as a still softer spot in the social crust. But this
rage for cities in America is prophetic. The name is a spell; and most
of the sites, surveyed and distributed into town-lots with squares and
parks staked out, are only a century before their time, and will redound
to the future credit, however fatal to the immediate cash of their
projectors. Who can doubt that Cairo of Illinois--the standing joke of
tourists, (and the standing-water of the Ohio and Mississippi,) though
no joke to its founders--will one day rival its Egyptian prototype?
America runs to cities, and particularly in its Northern latitudes.
As cities have been the nurses of democratic institutions and ideas,
democratic nations, for very obvious reasons, tend to produce them. They
are the natural fruits of a democracy. And with no people are great
cities so important, or likely to be so increasingly populous, as with
a great agricultural and commercial nation like our own, covered with
a free and equal population. The vast wealth of such a people, evenly
distributed, and prevented from over-accumulation in special families by
the absence of primogeniture and entail,--their general education
and refined tastes,--the intense community of ideas, through the
all-pervading influence of a daily press reaching with simultaneous
diffusion over thousands of square miles,--the facilities of
locomotion,--all inevitably cooperate with commercial necessities to
create great cities,--not merely as the homes of the mercantile and
wealthy class, but as centres where the leisure, the tastes, the
pride, and the wants of the people at large repair more and more for
satisfaction. Free populations, educated in public schools and with an
open career for all, soon instinctively settle the high economies of
life.

Many observers have ascribed the rapid change which for twenty years
past has been going on in the relative character of towns and villages
on the one hand, and cities on the other, to the mere operation of the
railroad-system. But that