The figures of the portentous growth of cities in our epoch recall the familiar story in the “Arabian Nights Entertainments” of the vessel which, sailing too near the Loadstone Mountain, was whelmed into sudden destruction. For the attraction of the loadstone was such that all the iron nails in the vessel were drawn out of their fastenings, and the timbers that were once a ship became mere flotsam and jetsam on the water. It is a wild and romantic fable in the mouth of the Princess Scheherazade; but it is grim reality in the world to-day. For the great city is to the rural population exactly what the Arabian loadstone mountain was to the heedless sailor who came within the range of its fascination. All the iron in the rural ship of State is attracted to the mighty Babylon. The men with iron in their blood, the girls whose pulses leap and tingle with the eager flush of adventure and ambition, desert the village and the farm to crowd the roaring mart and glaring street. The country is denuded of its most vigorous children. The city engulfs into its insatiate maw all those the brightest, the bravest, and the best. The process goes on at an ever accelerating ratio. As Mr. Godkin has well observed:-- Parks and gardens, cheap concerts, free museums and art galleries, cheap means of conveyance, model lodging-houses, rich charities, such as every city is now offering in abundance to all comers, are so many inducements to country poor to try their luck in the streets. They are the exact equivalents, as an invitation to the lazy and the pleasure-loving, of the Roman circus and free flour which we all use in explanation of the decline and fall of the Empire. They are luxuries which seem to be within every man’s reach gratis, and they act with tremendous force on the rural imagination.--_North American Review_, June, 1890.