Cincinnati is a city of homes and churches, and singularly free from the crime that prowls in the slums of other cities. Therefore some of its citizens take pride that the city is credited with being one of the greatest whiskey markets in America, that forty-three breweries and storage vaults are in demand, and that the city annually turns out 49,000,000 packs of playing-cards, making it the largest center of this industry in the world. In many industries Cincinnati leads. The wealth of cities throughout the continent is locked in banks and vaults manufactured in Cincinnati. The cowboys on the plains and the horsemen on city paddocks sit in saddles fashioned in Cincinnati. Cigars by the millions in this country are packed in boxes manufactured in Cincinnati. It produces more schoolbooks than any other city, and is near the head of the list in turning out religious publications. On the 22d of February, 1794, a canoe left Cincinnati with a federal mailbag consigned to Pittsburg. This marked the beginning of regular service with the East. In early days, a Cincinnati merchant seeking to buy goods in New York consumed sixty days in making the journey to the metropolis. To-day he may lunch in the Queen City, take a train and lunch the following noon in Manhattan. Long before the advent of railways, Cincinnati became a center of travel and distribution. As early as 1801, a full-rigged brig took on a cargo at Cincinnati and set sail for the West Indies. Not long after, and many years before Fulton turned his attention to Western waters, citizens of Cincinnati met at Yeatman's Tavern to consider a "contrivance for transporting boats against the current by the power of steam or elastic vapor," but without tangible results; and, in fact, when the first steamboat did paddle noisily past the city the circumstance was dignified with only a four-line notice in the Cincinnati press. Before long, however, the steamboat revolutionized river travel, and thenceforth Cincinnati leaped by bounds from a village to a great city, and every recurrent trip of these harbingers of vast commerce seemed to find a new suburb springing into bustling life on the Cincinnati uplands. [Illustration CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, CINCINNATI.] The fact that this city was originally included and still remains in the New Orleans customs district shows its accessibility to ocean traffic. Its superiority in water communication is shown by a computation made by the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce regarding the relative cost of transporting freight from points of origin to all parts of the United States. The comparisons per 100 pounds are as follows: From Cincinnati, 81 cents; Chicago, 84 cents; St. Louis, 88 cents; Minneapolis, $1.22. A similar computation applicable to a radius of 600 miles from the point of origin gives the following averages per 100 pounds: From Cincinnati, 66 cents; Chicago, 73 cents; St. Louis, 75 cents; Minneapolis, $1.11.