It is a task of some difficulty and no little importance; for not merely is New York--rightly or wrongly--regarded as the most typical and best known American city, but the United States tends more and more to become not a federation of States and territories, but an association of huge cities. The Great Ten not merely include within their boundaries nearly eight million persons, or more than ten per cent. of the whole population; they do the thinking and the guiding and the managing of a very large proportion of the remaining nine-tenths. Draw a circle with a three-hundred-mile radius round the Great Ten, and you inclose an area which is practically dominated by the Ten and educated by their newspapers. The Newspaper Area is a phrase not yet naturalised in geographies, but it is the most real and living area of all those into which the social organism is divided. For the newspaper collects its news every day, and sells its news every morning and evening, thereby creating a living, ever-renewed bond between the dwellers within the radius of its circulation infinitely superior to the nexus supplied by the tax-collector and the policeman. It is not difficult to define the length of the range within which a newspaper can create a constituency. It is rigidly limited by the distance from the printing-office in which a newspaper can be delivered before breakfast. After breakfast the influence of the newspaper dwindles every minute. Any one living so far off as not to be able to obtain his newspaper before dinner is practically outside the pale--unless, of course, he lives remote from any local centre of news distribution. In that case the range of influence is almost indefinite, as is shown to this day in the hold which the weekly _New York Tribune_ exercises over farmers scattered everywhere between the Atlantic and the Rocky Mountains. But speaking generally, the range of the Newspaper Area is limited by breakfast-time. [Illustration: THE FRONT DOOR OF THE NEW WORLD.] Greater New York has come into being in order to increase, not to diminish, the influence of New York in the Republic and in the world at large. This influence may be for evil. “Under the new charter,” says Mr. W. C. De Witt, Chairman of the Committee which drafted that document, “the City of New York at one bound becomes the mistress of the Western hemisphere and the second city of the world. It should be to its people what Athens was to the Greek, Rome to the Romans, Florence to the Florentine--an object of constant solicitude and of civic pride.” The question whether they intend to obey the voice of their friendly mentor is one on which the future fortune of the American Commonwealth will largely depend. For, as Mr. J. C. Adams pointed out in a thoughtful article on “The Municipal Threat in National Politics,” which he contributed to the _New England Magazine_ in July, 1891:--