STILL BLIND TO THE LESSON.
A SAN FRANCISCO journal says that New York estimates that by 1920 she will have a population of 8,320,000 within a twenty-mile circle centering at the City Hall. By 1913 San Francisco will have 750,000, is the prediction of the same journal. Thus we see that despite the fact that the cities are the centers of crime, of epidemic, of political corruption, and of disaster, the world's idea of progress and prosperity is phenomenal city-building. There is hardly a degrading, degenerating, demoralizing drawback to true civilization that does not find its chief impulse and cultivation in these great aggregations of extreme wealth and extreme poverty. Every effort is employed to concentrate men into heterogeneous masses to prey on one another, while the millions of fair acres of land in the country are idle or half cultivated. In summarizing the disasters of the present century, a secular press correspondent says, "The god of disaster seems to have taken demonical delight in laying his blighting hand on our centers of population." Well it could hardly be otherwise; few of the recognized great disasters could have occurred unless there had been abnormal concentration of people and property. But men refuse to learn the lesson, of which the pages of history overflow with examples—from Babel and Sodom to San Francisco.