The forces that have made New York dominant are inherent in our financial and industrial system; elsewhere those same forces, working in slightly different ways, created London, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Petrograd, and Moscow. What happened in the industrial towns of America was that the increments derived from land, capital, and association went, not to the enrichment of the local community, but to those who had a legal title to the land and the productive machinery. In other words, the gains that were made in Pittsburgh, Springfield, Dayton, and a score of other towns that became important in the industrial era were realized largely in New York, whose position had been established, before the turn of the century, as the locus of trade and finance. (New York passed the 500,000 mark in the 1850 census.) This is why, perhaps, during the ’seventies and ’eighties, decades of miserable depression throughout the industrial centres, there were signs of hope and promise in New York: the Museums of Art and Natural History were built: _Life_ and _Puck_ and a batch of newspapers were founded: the Metropolitan Opera House and Carnegie Hall were established: and a dozen other evidences of a vigorous civic life appeared. In a short time New York became the glass of fashion and the mould of form, and through the standardization, specialization, and centralization which accompany the machine process the Metropolis became at length the centre of advertising, the lender of farm mortgages, the distributor of boiler-plate news, the headquarters of the popular magazine, the publishing centre, and finally the chief disseminator of plays and motion pictures in America. The educational foundations which the exploiter of the Kodak has established at Rochester were not characteristic of the early part of the industrial period--otherwise New York’s eminence might have been briskly challenged before it had become, after its fashion, unchallengeable. The increment from Mr. Carnegie’s steel works built a hall of music for New York long before it created the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. In other words, the widespread effort of the American provincial to leave his industrial city for New York comes to something like an attempt to get back from New York what had been previously filched from the industrial city.