=What is a City?=—The poet Cowper once said that “God made the country and man made the town”, a remark which was not intended to flatter the cities. Nor is there any reason why life in a crowded community should particularly appeal to poets although it may have a strong fascination for more worldly-minded men. A large body of people living closely together, a place of busy streets and tall buildings, a huge, noisy, jostling throng—that is the customary notion of an American city, and on the whole it is not far wide of the facts. Not all cities, however, are big, busy, and congested. In the entire United States there are today about a thousand places which call themselves cities, yet more than half of them are places of less than fifteen thousand people. In Massachusetts no place can become a city until it has at least ten thousand people; but in Oklahoma the figure is two thousand and in Kansas only two hundred. A city may be anything, therefore, from a rural hamlet with only a few hundred people to a great metropolitan community with several millions. Size or population are not the things that determine cityhood. A place is a city if it has been so incorporated and possesses a city charter. So far as its government is concerned, it cannot be called a city, no matter how populous it may be, unless it has been given a charter by authority of the state.[65] In the West the practice has been to grant such charters to relatively small places; in the East the requirements are more strict. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE GROWTH OF AMERICAN CITIES The table and diagram on the reverse of this page will serve to make clear the phenomenal growth of American cities during the past hundred and thirty years. In 1820 only one person in twenty lived in cities and towns of over 8,000 population; today nine persons in every twenty live in these communities. The population of the whole country has been growing steadily during the past hundred years; but the cities have been increasing even more rapidly. These figures should be studied in connection with the discussion on pages 184-186.