ral situation. Denver is an
equally conspicuous instance of the same tendency. The changes that
took place in that city between the date of my visit to it and the
reading of the proof-sheets of "Baedeker's United States" a year or so
later demanded an almost entire rewriting of the description.
Doubtless it has altered at least as much since then, and very likely
the one or two slightly critical remarks of the handbook of 1893 are
already grossly libellous. Denver quadrupled its population between
1880 and 1890. The value of its manufactures and of the precious ores
smelted here reaches a fabulous amount of millions of dollars. The
usual proportion of "million" and "two million dollar buildings" have
been erected. Many of the principal streets are (most wonderful of
all!) excellently paved and kept reasonably clean. But the crowning
glory of Denver for every intelligent traveller is its magnificent
view of the Rocky Mountains, which are seen to the West in an unbroken
line of at least one hundred and fifty miles. Though forty miles
distant, they look, owing to the purity of the atmosphere, as if they
were within a walk of two or three hours. Denver is fond of calling
herself the "Queen City of the Plains," and few will grudge the
epithet queenly if it is applied to the possession of this matchless
outlook on the grandest manifestations of nature. If the Denver
citizen brags more of his State Capitol, his Metropole Hotel (no
accent, please!), and his smelting works than of his snow-piled
mountains and abysmal canons, he only follows a natural human instinct
in estimating most highly that which has cost him most trouble.

Mr. James Bryce has an interesting chapter on the absence of a capital
in the United States. By capital he means "a city which is not only
the seat of political government, but is also by the size, wealth, and
character of its population the head and centre of the country, a
leading seat of commerce and industry, a reservoir of financial
resources, the favoured residence of the great and powerful, the spot
in which the chiefs of the learned professions are to be found, where
the most potent and widely read journals are published, whither men of
literary and scientific capacity are drawn." New York journalists,
with a happy disregard of the historical connotation of language, are
prone to speak of their city as a metropolis; but it is very evident
that the most liberal interpretation of the word cannot el