not have been sustained; on the contrary they would have been most likely declared anomalous to our system of government as it then stood, and now stands. But certainly if the experiment of such a municipal government had not been interrupted in its progress, it might have been an instructive object lesson in the government of cities; and even as it is, the founding of Nauvoo, the "city-state," suggests an important idea which may work out great practical reforms in municipal government in our country. The founders of our Government dealt with conditions that were very simple in comparison with the complexity of the conditions which government in its various forms, municipal, state and national, is confronted with today. The Municipal problems which now vex the people had not then arisen above the horizon of their experience. The American commonwealths of the early decades of the nineteenth century were practically rural commonwealths. At the time of Washington's inauguration (1789) the population of New York was but thirty-three thousand; Philadelphia forty-two thousand; Boston but eighteen thousand; Baltimore thirteen thousand; Brooklyn one thousand six hundred, and more village than town. Now compare these cities with their present population. New York has a population of over four millions; [6] Philadelphia a population of one and a half millions; [7] Boston more than half {XXV} a million; [8] Baltimore over five hundred thousand; [9] Brooklyn is absorbed in New York, but as a borough of the larger city it has a population of nearly one and a half millions; [10] Chicago, which in 1840 had but four thousand inhabitants, much smaller than Nauvoo, has now a population of more than two millions; [11] St. Louis which in 1840 had a population of but 16,469, has now a population of three quarters of a million. [12] Nothing like the growth of urban population within the United States during the last fifty years has been known in the history of the world, and it has brought to the inhabitants of these cities problems undreamed of by the founders of our government. Every year discloses more and more distinctly the fact that between these condensed communities and the town, village, and rural population of the states in which they are located, there are very distinct interests and governmental problems of widely differing character. The differences which justify distinct local governments in the state of New York and the peninsula of Florida are not more insistent than the differences between the great commercial city of New York and the state of the same name. Without entering upon elaborate discussion of these questions (a discussion which is foreign to the character of this writing) I venture the suggestion that separate and complete state governments for our large cities, or the elevation of them into what I have called "city-states," such as Nauvoo was, in an incipient way, will be the solution to most of the problems of