It has seemed best to dwell upon this topic of the City's present magnitude and general condition. Such a study of the people can hardly fail to enlighten those who conduct their affairs, or to arouse and stimulate a collective and aggressive public spirit, and a sentiment of just local pride, such as become a great community. Few revelations of the future are as clear as that the commanding, if not the overwhelming problems of politics, are to spring hereafter from such communities. The necessities of compact and highly-organized bodies of people; the vast private enterprises, as well as public works, which must minister to their daily wants; the stress of industrial competition among them; the pressure of class upon class; the jarring of interest upon interest; the demand for comprehensive, honest and far-sighted administration of their public affairs; the absolute need to maintain order upon its established foundations; the fierce contentions and uneasy vitality which accompany hasty or irregular municipal growth; these and other features of city life, suggests much food for thought for the present and approaching generation of Americans. Since cities are to be so great a factor as well as so great a product in our material expansion, it follows that the government of cities is the one quarter of the political field in which American institutions must not fail; for if popular self-government fails there it fails at the heart, at the centre and source of vital and nervous power. In cities, therefore, are to be met those trials whose issue will determine in what characters the later pages of American history are to be inscribed. To designate great cities as an evil, or as a peril, is to note but half their significance. If men, when massed together, are accessible to evil suggestions they are likewise accessible to that which is good. At all events, the problem is not obscure or hard to find. One might go farther and say that in the question of the future of our cities is involved more even than the destiny of popular self-government. It involves the success or the failure of all the agencies of progress and of enlightenment. The moral and spiritual interests of the people cannot be separated from those which fall within the scope of governmental influence. Moreover, these great populations will not remain at rest either materially or otherwise. Their condition will be one of advancement or of progressive demoralization and decay.