[T] “Every place of worship gathers about it dwellings of the priests, schools, and rest-houses for pilgrims.”--Ratzel, l. c. II., p. 575. Naturally, every place toward which great pilgrimages proceed becomes an extended trade center. We may see the remembrances thereof in the fact that the great wholesale markets, held at stated times in Northern Europe, are called _Messen_ from the religious ceremony. These are but accidental historical admixtures. In its strict economic sense “city” means the place of the economic means, or the exchange and interchange for equivalent values between rural production and manufacture. This corresponds to the common use of language, by which a stronghold however great, an agglomeration of temples, cloisters and places of pilgrimage however extensive, were they conceivable without any place for exchange, would be designated after their external characteristics as “like a city” or “resembling a city.” Although there may have been few changes in the exterior of the historical city, there has taken place an internal revolution on a magnificent scale. _The industrial city is directly opposed to the state._ As the state is the developed political means, _so the industrial city is the developed economic means_. The great contest filling universal history, nay its very meaning, henceforth takes place between city and state. The city as an economic, political body undermines the feudal system with political and economic arms. With the first the city _forces_, with the second it _lures_, their power away from the feudal master class. This process takes place in the field of politics by the interference of the city, now a center of its own powers, in the political mechanism of the developed feudal state, between the central power and the local territorial magnates and their subjects. The cities are the strongholds and the dwelling places of warlike men, as well as depots of material for carrying on war (arms, etc.); and later they become central supply reservoirs for money used in the contests between the central government and the growing territorial princes, or between these in their internecine wars. Thus they are important strategic points or valuable allies; and may by far-sighted policy acquire important rights.