tion,
what the people were and what they are, what they have and what they
want, until they tell us. Our cahier must wait the pleasure of the
people." Meanwhile, the regent, irreverently called Uncle Sam, who rules
the land while his master is away in Utopia, reads the cahiers of the
nobles, laughs in his sleeve at that of the clergy, and forgets all
about that of the third estate. Or if he thinks of it at all, it is only
to try to fill its place with twenty-four-volume Census Reports and
massive tomes from the other departments.

The cahiers of the third estate are, in truth, few and defective, yet
there are some communities that have done their work well. For example,
there is The Memorial History of Boston which does credit even to the
Hub of American historical literature. It was the work of cultivated
men, and although the cooks were many, the broth is excellent. That the
people were a-hungering for just such broth is shown by the fact that
the net profits from it in the first twelve months after publication, as
it is said, were over fifty thousand dollars.

Boston is almost the only city in the land that has been the subject of
a full, accurate, and interesting history. The History of New York, by
Martha J. Lamb, is not so full as might have been wished, but is
otherwise unexceptionable. New York is fortunate in having the most
graphic and humorous history of its early days that any city in the
world ever had, but nobody except Diedrich Knickerbocker himself ever
claimed a great amount of accuracy and truthfulness for his unrivaled
work.

It was to be expected that our older cities,--those whose seeds were
planted by Puritans, Dutch traders, Catholic fugitives, Quakers,
Cavalier spendthrifts and rogues, Huguenot exiles, and in general the
motley crowd that sought the land of milk and honey in the seventeenth
and early part of the eighteenth centuries,--it was to be expected that
these cities would have historians _ad nauseam_. The very nature of the
early colonization of America, the elements of romance and adventure so
conspicuous in the history of early days on the Atlantic coast, gave
warrant to such expectations, and the event has justified them. But
where the romance and adventure end, the historian lays down his pen. It
is left to the census enumerator to complete the work, and the brazen
age of statistics follows the golden age of history.

As the cities in the heart of the continent have very little of