The city has had a singular and instructive history, and that she has survived so many vicissitudes and calamities, and entered upon an extraordinary career of prosperity, is sufficient evidence of the territorial necessity of a large city just at this point on the river. The student of social science will find in its history a striking illustration of the relation of sound sanitary and business conditions to order and morality. Before the war, and for some time after it, Memphis was a place for trade in one staple, where fortunes were quickly made and lost, where no attention was paid to sanitary laws. The cloud of impending pestilence always hung over it, the yellow-fever was always a possibility, and a devastating epidemic of it must inevitably be reckoned with every few years. It seems to be a law of social life that an epidemic, or the probability of it, engenders a recklessness of life and a low condition of morals and public order. Memphis existed, so to speak, on the edge of a volcano, and it cannot be denied that it had a reputation for violence and disorder. While little or nothing was done to make the city clean and habitable, or to beautify it, law was weak in its mobile, excitable population, and differences of opinion were settled by the revolver. In spite of these disadvantages, the profits of trade were so great there that its population of twenty thousand at the close of the war had doubled by 1878. In that year the yellow-fever came as an epidemic, and so increased in 1879 as nearly to depopulate the city; its population was reduced from nearly forty thousand to about fourteen thousand, two-thirds of which were negroes; its commerce was absolutely cut off, its manufactures were suspended, it was bankrupt. There is nothing more unfortunate for a State or a city than loss of financial credit. Memphis struggled in vain with its enormous debt, unable to pay it, unable to compromise it.