The evolution of Cincinnati seems to have been a little peculiar in American life. It is a rich city, priding itself on the solidity of its individual fortunes and business, and the freedom of its real property from foreign mortgages. Usually in our development the pursuit of wealth comes first, and then all other things are added thereto, as we read the promise. In Cincinnati there seems to have been a very considerable cultivation first in time, and we have the spectacle of what wealth will do in the way of the sophistication and materialization of society. Ordinarily we have the process of an uncultivated community gradually working itself out into a more or less ornamented and artistic condition as it gets money. The reverse process we might see if the philosophic town of Concord, Massachusetts, should become the home of rich men engaged in commerce and manufacturing. I may be all wrong in my notion of Cincinnati, but there is a sort of tradition, a remaining flavor of old-time culture before the town became commercially so important as it was before the war. It is difficult to think of Cincinnati as in Ohio. I cannot find their similarity of traits. Indeed, I think that generally in the State there is a feeling that it is an alien city; the general characteristics of the State do not flow into and culminate in Cincinnati as its metropolis. It has had somehow an independent life. If you look on a geologic map of the State, you see that the glacial drift, I believe it is called, which flowed over three-fourths of the State and took out its wrinkles did not advance into the south-west. And Cincinnati lies in the portion that was not smoothed into a kind of monotony. When a settlement was made here it was a good landing-place for trade up and down the river, and was probably not so much thought of as a distributing and receiving point for the interior north of it. Indeed, up to the time of the war, it looked to the South for its trade, and naturally, even when the line of war was drawn, a good deal of its sympathies lay in the direction of its trade. It had become a great city, and grown rich both in trade and manufactures, but in the decline of steamboating and in the era of railways there were physical difficulties in the way of adapting itself easily to the new conditions. It was not easy to bring the railways down the irregular hills and to find room for them on the landing. The city itself had to contend with great natural obstacles to get adequate foothold, and its radiation over, around, and among the hills produced some novel features in business and in social life.