Moreover, Newark has now a much larger number of persons who are interested in its development and its character and its recent self-improvement than it had fifteen years ago. Consequently, the requests received from adults for facts and figures concerning recent events in our city are much more numerous than they were formerly. Looking back over the world's history with the perspective of many years, you would not find it an easy matter to select any fifteen-year period about which you might wish to write even the briefest review. That is, events appear to lose their importance or to produce unexpected results with the passing years, and only a comparatively few happenings remain conspicuous for all time and for all peoples. There is, however, a peculiar fascination about history in the making, and especially local history within one's own memory. Perhaps it may be compared to the study of a dead language as an intellectual pursuit and the study of a live language for the pleasure or profit of human intercourse. Both are desirable--the one, as a background, the other, as a foreground of education. Newark's history from the days of Robert Treat was so thoroughly reviewed at the time of the 250th Anniversary Celebration, 1916, that we have elected to treat as background everything prior to 1904 and to concern ourselves with the story of Newark from that year to the present. This means that the high school graduate of June, 1919, should find between the covers of this pamphlet a record of the city from the time he or she entered the kindergarten. With these dates in mind it was really astonishing to find how many changes and what material advances had been made within the fifteen years. As you thought of the building of the City Hall and Court House; the changed appearance of the "Four Corners"; the opening of the Hudson and Manhattan Tubes; the new Public Service Terminal; the adaptation of automatic appliances in fire fighting; the impetus given movements like "Safety First", vacant lot cultivation and thrift with its school banks; the bigger civic undertakings like City Plan, Passaic Valley Sewer; Port Newark and the unexpected trend of its development due to the war; the war itself, representing the effect of a world event on a city's activities; the 250th Anniversary, a local celebration, but illustrative of Newark's relations with the outside world; and, finally, of the change of city administration to Commission Government--you wonder whether history at close range invariably presents so much of interest, or whether 1904-1919 happens to be a particularly progressive period, or whether Newark, suddenly conscious of its backwardness in many lines, is now making up for lost time.