future credit, however fatal to the immediate cash of their projectors.  Who can doubt that Cairo of Illinois—­the standing joke of tourists, (and the standing-water of the Ohio and Mississippi,) though no joke to its founders—­will one day rival its Egyptian prototype?  America runs to cities, and particularly in its Northern latitudes.  As cities have been the nurses of democratic institutions and ideas, democratic nations, for very obvious reasons, tend to produce them.  They are the natural fruits of a democracy.  And with no people are great cities so important, or likely to be so increasingly populous, as with a great agricultural and commercial nation like our own, covered with a free and equal population.  The vast wealth of such a people, evenly distributed, and prevented from over-accumulation in special families by the absence of primogeniture and entail,—­their general education and refined tastes,—­the intense community of ideas, through the all-pervading influence of a daily press reaching with simultaneous diffusion over thousands of square miles,—­the facilities of locomotion,—­all inevitably cooperate with commercial necessities to create great cities,—­not merely as the homes of the mercantile and wealthy class, but as centres where the leisure, the tastes, the pride, and the wants of the people at large repair more and more for satisfaction.  Free populations, educated in public schools and with an open career for all, soon instinctively settle the high economies of life.

Many observers have ascribed the rapid change which for twenty years past has been going on in the relative character of towns and villages on the one hand, and cities on the other, to the mere operation of the railroad-system.  But that system itself grew out of higher instincts.  Equal communities demand equal privileges and advantages.  They tend to produce a common level.  The country does not acquiesce in the superiority of the city in manners, comforts, or luxuries.  It demands a market at its door,—­first-rate men for its advisers in all medical, legal, moral, and political matters.  It demands for itself the amusements, the refinements, the privileges of the city.  This is to be brought about only by the application, at any cost, of the most immediate methods of communication with the city; and behold our railroad system,—­the Briarean shaking of hands which the country gives the city!  The growth of this system is a curious commentary on the purely mercenary policy which is ordinarily supposed to govern the investments of capital.  The railroads of the United States are as much the products of social rivalries and the fruits of an ineradicable democratic instinct for popularizing all advantages, as of any commercial emulation.  The people have willingly bandaged their own eyes, and allowed themselves to believe a profitable investment was made, because their inclinations were so determined to have the roads, profitable or not.  Their wives and daughters would shop in the city; the choicest sights and sounds were there; there concentrated themselves the intellectual and moral lights; there were the representative splendors of the state or nation;—­and a swift access to them was essential to true equality and self-respect.