Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 November 1884 — PHENOMENAL CITIES. [ARTICLE]

PHENOMENAL CITIES.

> • ' Tom Alexander, a younj, man of Atlanta, and the possessor of a fortune, killed himself because the parents of a thirteen-year-old girl whom he loved denied him the privilege of calling on her. j The Paris Figaro recently manufactured a tale concerning Count Moltke, in which it was stated that the great General was so weak that a servant had to feed him with a spoon. To which the German papers reply that Moltke is quite strong enough to whip France once more. General William Mahone, the Virginia politician, looks like Kip Van Winkle with his long gray beard and tangled locks. He wears a long broadcloth coat, which almost sweeps the ground; a' ruffled shirt, with Bmall turned-down collar, and egg-shell shaped cuffs, from which his tiny hands protrude like the calix from a lily. His feet, “like mice, peep in and out” of his baloon-shaped trousers. He has a soft, low, eountry burr in his speech. The quilt patch from Calcasieu parish, Louisiana, to form a quilt map of Louisiana for the exposition, is now completed. The design is beautiful, and ihe workmansnip ingenious. On one side a grove of pine trees is handsomely embossed; on the other side stands a deer in the midst of a field of golden rice. In the center are the words “Calcasieu parish,” worked in red and blue. The groundwork is dark brown. The design and work are from the conception and hands of Mrs. E. J. Meyer, of Lake Charles.

Mr; William Bigelow, of Detroit, who was a soldier, then a private, in the Michigan battery during the war of the rebellion, is now traveling in Europe. At the battle of Stone River Mr. Bigelow was carrying ammunition from the caisson to the cannon, when a bullet came whizzing along and carried away nearly all of his front teeth. He spit out the loose pieces and murmured: “Uncle Sam’s got to buy me a set of store teeth or I’ll join therebs.” And then he returned for another flam nel sackful of gunpowder. Joseph M. Alsop, who died near Spottsylvania Court House, on the southern border of the Virginia Wilderness, a few days ago, had his home at a historic spot. The veterans who could tell one of “Alsop’s farm” run up into the tens of thousands, for 200,000 men were roundabout the place during the second week in May, 1864. The honored Sedgwick was the target for a sharpshooter’s bit of leed right at Alsop’s, and down he fell fight no metre except as memory and spirit that strengthened the Sixth Corps ever after: Some hitherto unpublished letters of Prof. S. F. B. Morse are made public by Judge W. W. Broadman, of Hew Haven, to whom they were addressed forty-two years ago, while the latter gentleman was in Congress. A feature of the correspondence, interesting because of the advances in other departments of electrical science than telegraphy, is a quotation from a letter of Prof. Joseph Henry to the great inventor. He says: “In the minds of many the electric-magnetic telegraph is associated -with the various chimerical projects constantly presented to the public and' particularly with the schemes so popular a year or two ago for the application of electricity as a movin" in the arts.”

Mr. Gladstone has, of course, long ago lowered all legitimate records achieved in the field of exuberrant verbosity. Few are aware, however, of the fearful and wonderful rate at which he continues to add to the pages of Hansard. It is nearly twelve months since an enthusiastic statistician, who is also a devoted Gladstoneite, spent six hours each day during over fifty days in the library of the House of Commons and sixty days overhauling the newspaper files in the British Museum in the task of tracing the Prime Minister back to the first recorded sylible of liis political voice. This victin of hero worship found that Mr. Gladstone had talked, up to July, 1883, fourteen miles and a half of print. He has added 700 yards in the interval. He can hardly hope to put a girdle round the earth, but he has far excelled all other windmills of his age in articulation. In an address delivered by Sir Richard Temple on “Economic Science and Statistics," before the British Association at Montreal, it was stated that the population of the British Empire consists of 39,000,000 Anglo-Saxons, 188,000,000 Hindus, and 88,000,000 Mohamedans, etc., —a total of 315,000,000. The area of the Empire and its dependencies is 10,000,000 square miles. The annual revenue is: United Kingdoni, £89,000,000; India, £74,000,000; colonies and dependencies, £40,000,000; total, £203,000,000. local taxation, the total revenue is £264,000,000. The number of trained soldiers is 850,000, of whom about 700,000 are of the dominant race. In addition, there are . ■■ ■ - 560,000 policemen in the Empire. The

• UII VI r** sohOol attendance is: United Kingdom* 5,250,000; Canada, 860,000; Australia, 611,OCtO; India, 2,200,00 d; a total, in, the Empire, of 8,921,000 pupils. Charles Reade’s kindness was proverbial. One of many instances is related as follows by a friend: “At a critical period in my life I had lost niy whole fortune in a disastrous enterprise, which left me high and dry without a shilling. I had dined at Albert Gate the night before. Next morning Reade burst into my room and planked a bag of sovereigns on the table quite sufficient to enable me to tide over my immediate necessities, exclaiming abruptly : ‘I saw you seemed rather gene last night; there, that’s something to buy postage stamps with, and if you want any more there’s plenty left where that came from.’ And he was gone before I had time to reply.”

As to the silver dollar, the picture of the United States Government getting in line before the New York Clearing House and receiving the treatment accorded by a cross teller to a newlyemployed messenger-boy, is, says the Chicago Current, very tiresome to the whole people of the country. The idea of a banking association compelling a National Treasury; in time of peace, to discriminate against its own legal tender—to except a toterie of financiers from the “laws which are good enough for the people at large—that idea is monstrous. What right has Wall Street to dominate the Secretary of the Treasury? Has Wall Street done anything this year, for instance, which has entitled it to either our gratiftide or respect? Not anything. Then give them silver or call the account square after the tender and refusal of silver. The way the silver law is defined in New York is criminal. Mr. John Sherman first consented to the arrangement, and no Secretary since has had the rectitude to abolish the practice and execute the will of the people.

The “Memoirs of Lord Malmesbury” are creating a considerable sensation, and all the papers are quoting some of the choice bits. There are very funny glimpses in the private life of Gladstone' and Disraeli; for instance, Gladstone’s appearance is described as disappointing, because so like that of a Catholic priest, and one of his crazes in the course of his musical education was an enthusiastic love of negro melody, which he used to sing with the greatest spirit and enjoyment, never leaving out a verse. “Camptown Races” was for a time his favorite ditty. Disraeli appears as much less cold and apetketic in private than his sphinxlike immobility in public would suggest. Ho confesses himself on one occasion, when there was a prospect of getting office, that lie felt as delighted as a young girl going to her first ball, and, according to Lord Malmesbury, was, when outside of the house, always in the highest state of elation or the lowest depth of despair, according to the fortunes of the day. A fine piece of unconscious humor is this: “Disraeli was at the breakfast, and seemed rather low. He told me the Queen had sent him her last book."

The railroads, says the Current, would all be making money if interest were not being paid on misspent money. As it is, even, many corporations, after watering their stock two or three times, aro compelled to greatly expand the meaning of the term “operating account” in order to hide from the public the true earning-power of their enterprises. The Northern Pacific earned over $12,000,000 last year. Even with all the possible peculiarities of railroading likely to be concealed in $7,000,000 of “operating expenses,” $5,425,820 left as a tribute —not to the men who advanced the money to build the road, but to the men who, buying the stock after the real builders had lost their all, now gather a tithe from the people of the far northwest which is surely worth the collecting. So, too, the Wabash, out of nearly $7,000.000 received, paid only two-sevenths of that sum for labor. Now, why should any railroad, operated in the way a man builds a house or drives a team, take in $7,000,000, pay only $2,000,000 for labor, and still bo bankrupt and ir. the receiver's hands?. One of the surest reasons for these industrial absurdities lies in the colossal fortunes piled up so rapidly and so recently in Wall street. When Jay Gould shewed the doubting Thomases of the Stock Exchange $70,000,000 of “property,” he did more to establish the truth of Proudhon’s position that property is robbery than all the writings of Karl Marx or the orations of Ferdinand Lassalle-

Growth of the Principal .Towns of the .'United States During the Nineteenth Century. At the beginning of the nineteenth cxntury there was not a city in America north of Mexfico that contained as many as 75,000 inhabitants. Philadelphia led with 70,262, New York coming in for the second place, with a little over CO,000; Baltimore third, with 26,000, and Boston fourth, with 24,000. When the century was ten years old, Philadelphia was still the leading city, having 96,664, or 271 more than New York, Baltimore running close toward 50,000, and Boston having 15,000 less than Baltimore. In 1820 there were but two cities in the United States with a population of 100,000 and over, and New York was first, with 123,000, Philadelphia having dropped back to the Second place, with 108,000. West of the Alleghany mountains there was no place dignified by the name of city. Cincinnati had less than 10,000, St. Louis less than 5,000, Pittsburgh less than 8,000. Tliere was no such place as Chicago till after 1840. New Orleans had more than trebled her inhabitants from the opening of the century to the end of the second decade, ancl ranked as the fifth city, and next after Boston. In 1830 New York showed above 203,000, and Philadelphia but 167,000, Baltimore still ahead of Boston, but ntft half equal to Philadelphia, and New Orleans stiil holding the fifth place. There were still but two cities with 100,000 and over. In 1840 New York had 312,000, Philadelphia 258,000, Baltimore 134,000, New t Orleans, 102,000, and Boston bnt 93,000, having exchanged rank with New Orleans, Cincinnati coming next to Boston with only half as many inhabitants. In 1840 the population of St. Louis was but 16,469, and there were eighteen cities ahead of her, Washington, with 23,000, being one of them. The mid-century decade census returned six cities with 100,000 and over; two with more than 300,000, and one, New York, with 515,547. Boston, with 136,000, had slipped past New Orleans, which has not yet regained her rank of 1840. In the middie of the century there were six cities west of the Alleghanies, including New Orleans and San Francisco, rated above 30,000, and Chicago was not one of them. St Louis had risen to 77,000, Louisville to 43,000, and San Francisco from 500 in 1840 to 34,776 in 1850. The population of Chicago in that year was but 29,963, She has added over 600,000 to it in the last thirty-four years,according to her latest local census. Tlie whole urban population of the Mississippi valley, including Pittsburgh, New Orleans, and counting in San Francisco, was in 1850 but 434,242 of cities above 30,000. New York alone had 81,000 more than all the cities west oZ the Alleghenies over 30,000 each. So far there., had been nothing of that phenomenal growth which has since mdtje some of the western cities the wonder of the world. In-1860 the cities of the Union ranked in this order: New York first, Philadelpliia second, Brooklyn third, with 260,000, Baltimore fourth, Boston fifth, New Orleans sixth, Cincinnati seventh, St. Louis eighth, and but 200 behind Cincinnati, and Chicago ninth, with 109,050 —an increase of 80,000, or nearly 280 per cent, in ten years. The increase of New York in the same years was but 290,000, or about 56 per cent. The seventh decade of the century was ushered in with the accompaniament of the most appalling civil war of the historic era of the human race. For four years it was a check upon urban growth as well as the general increase of population throughout the country. Hitherto the ratio of increase had exceeded 33 per cent, per decade. But in the decade from 1860 to 1870 it fell to bnt a little over 224 per cent, for the whole country. In this decade New Yoik increased but 136,000, or less than 18 per cent., but Chicago’s addition to her population from 1860 to 1870 was 189,000, or 144 per cent,, and she took rank as the fifth city of the nation, having parsed Cincinnati, Baltimore, Boston, and New Orleans. Ban Francisco had advanced from 56,000 to 149,000 —an increase of 93,000, or nearly 198 per cent., in the decade, and had caught up with and passed Washington, Albany, and Louisville, all of which outranked her in 1860, and had Jieaten every city but Chicago in the per cent, of her growth. The four cities ahead of Chicago in 1870 were New York, Philadelphia, Brooklyn and St. Louis, though the right of the latter to the fourth place was questioned by Chicago and doubted by tho public. In 1870 there were fourteen cities having over 100,000 each, eight over 200,000, four over 300,000, and two over 600,000. New York had but 58,000 less than 1,000,000. From the beginning of the century her increase to 1870 was nearly 900,000. The census of 1880 returned twenty cities having over 100,000, ten over 200,000, seven over 300,000, four over 500,000, two over 800,000, and one (New York) with 1, 206,299. The rank of the cities having over 500,000 each was New York first, Philadelphia secodd, Brooklyn third, Chicago fourth, with 503,000, her increase being 205,000, or nearly 80 per cent. - The rank of San Francisco was tenth, and next to Cincinnati, and its increase from 1870 was 84,000, or a little over 56 per cent. It had passed New Orleans and was rapidly closing on Cincinnati, having distanced Washington, Louisville, and Buffalo. •