overspreading of the population since 1880, has been bewildering in its progress, and remains so, in spite of the fact that there has been all this time in process of building, directly across the river, a sort of overflow city of sixty thousand people. The city lost its river trade but has made up for it in utilization of the railroads, and is now preparing again to use the mighty, free, natural highway for the transportation of products to the world at large. St. Louis, so often thought of as slow, has really grown with phenomenal rapidity. It is one of the wealthiest cities in the country, a city of homes, and a city of perhaps more beautiful homes widely distributed in different sections than are to be found elsewhere. The wealthy men of St. Louis are almost all young men. The greater fortunes in St. Louis, with but few exceptions, have been made within the past twenty years, and many of them in the last ten years, and these now utterly eclipse the fortunes that have been handed down from the earlier days. The city has to-day a population of 575,000. In the suburban territory there are over 700,000 more people in close relationship daily and almost hourly with the business and social life of the city. The "slow old town" is not so slow when it is remembered that within one year after a cyclone swept it in May, 1896, there was not a trace of the visitation. Its conservatism is very real, but it is not stagnation. St. Louis has gone on with its work, even though war and the industrial tendencies consequent on war, and the political and social drift growing out of war have been in opposition to the city's progress. The city has built steadily but well, passing through the panic of 1893 without a single failure. The earlier history of the town shows how the conservatism so thoughtlessly derided came to be ingrained in the life of the city. It shows, too, the pertinacity which has made St. Louis the fourth city in the Union, in defiance of the disaster that befell its prestige in the great war, and in defiance too of the circumstance that the new popular national activities generated after that great conflict found their most congenial field in regions practically out of reach of, and wholly antipathetic to the interests of the chief city of Missouri. The new South and the new Southwest mean a new St. Louis. And we shall see what the new St. Louis means when the city expresses its higher and better self in the Exposition with which its people purpose to celebrate the purchase, by the United States, in 1803, of the Louisiana Territory. [Illustration EADS BRIDGE AT ST. LOUIS.] [Illustration UNION STATION, ST. LOUIS.] [Illustration] [Illustration] KANSAS CITY THE CENTRAL CITY BY CHARLES S. GLEED