ter-houses, and even
canals, docks, and pawn-shops are owned and controlled by the cities
themselves. There is no loop-hole for private plunder, and there is,
on the contrary, every incentive to all citizens, and to the rich in
particular, to enforce the strictest economy and the most expert
efficiency.

What theatres, opera-houses, orchestras, museums, what well-paved and
clean streets, what parks Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and San
Francisco might have, had these cities only a part of the money, of
which in the last twenty-five years they have been robbed! It is true
that the older cities of Germany have traditions behind them that we
lack. Art treasures, old buildings, and an intelligent population
demanding the best in music and the drama we cannot hope to supply,
but good house-keeping is another matter. Berlin, for example, is a
new city as compared with New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Detroit,
and its growth has been very rapid.

It cannot be said for us alone that we have grown so fast that we have
had no time to keep pace with the needs of our population. Berlin, all
Germany indeed, has been growing at a prodigious rate. The population
of Berlin in 1800 was 100,000; in 1832 only 250,000; hardly half a
million in 1870; while the population now is over 2,000,000, and over
3,000,000 if one includes the suburbs, which are for all practical
purposes part and parcel of Berlin. Charlottenburg, for example, with
a population of 19,517 in 1871, now has a population of 305,976, and
the vicinage of Berlin has grown in every direction in like
proportions.

There were no towns in Germany till the eighth century, except those
of the Romans on the Rhine and the Danube. In 1850 there were only 5
towns in Germany with more than 100,000 inhabitants, and in 1870 only
8; in 1890, 26; in 1900, 33; in 1905, 41; in 1910, 47; and nearly the
whole increase of population is now massed in the middle-sized and
large cities. The same may be said of the drift of population in
America. "A thrifty but rather unprogressive provincial town of 60,000
inhabitants," writes Mr. J. H. Harper, of New York, in 1810.

Between 1860 and 1900 the proportion of urban to rural population in
the United States more than doubled. In the last ten years the
percentage of people living in cities, or other incorporated places of
more than 2,500 inhabitants, increased from 40.5 to 46.3 per cent. of
the total; while twenty years ago only 36.1 per cent.