Denver, a near neighbour of Colorado Springs (if we speak more Americano), is an excellent example, both in theory and practice, of the confident expectation of growth with which new American cities are founded.  The necessary public buildings are not huddled together as a nucleus from which the municipal infant may grow outwards; but a large and generous view is taken of the possibilities of expansion.  Events do not always justify this sanguine spirit of forethought.  The capitol at Washington still turns its back on the city of which it was to be the centre as well as the crown.  In a great number of cases, however, hope and fact eventually meet together.  The capitol of Bismarck, chief town of North Dakota, was founded in 1883, nearly a mile from the city, on a rising site in the midst of the prairie.  It has already been reached by the advancing tide of houses, and will doubtless, in no long time, occupy a conveniently central situation.  Denver is an equally conspicuous instance of the same tendency.  The changes that took place in that city between the date of my visit to it and the reading of the proof-sheets of “Baedeker’s United States” a year or so later demanded an almost entire rewriting of the description.  Doubtless it has altered at least as much since then, and very likely the one or two slightly critical remarks of the handbook of 1893 are already grossly libellous.  Denver quadrupled its population between 1880 and 1890.  The value of its manufactures and of the precious ores smelted here reaches a fabulous amount of millions of dollars.  The usual proportion of “million” and “two million dollar buildings” have been erected.  Many of the principal streets are (most wonderful of all!) excellently paved and kept reasonably clean.  But the crowning glory of Denver for every intelligent traveller is its magnificent view of the Rocky Mountains, which are seen to the West in an unbroken line of at least one hundred and fifty miles.  Though forty miles distant, they look, owing to the purity of the atmosphere, as if they were within a walk of two or three hours.  Denver is fond of calling herself the “Queen City of the Plains,” and few will grudge the epithet queenly if it is applied to the possession of this matchless outlook on the grandest manifestations of nature.  If the Denver citizen brags more of his State Capitol, his Metropole Hotel (no accent, please!), and his smelting works than of his snow-piled mountains and abysmal canons, he only follows a natural human instinct in estimating most highly that which has cost him most trouble.

Mr. James Bryce has an interesting chapter on the absence of a capital in the United States.  By capital he means “a city which is not only the seat of political government, but is also by the size, wealth, and character of its population the head and centre of the country, a leading seat of commerce and industry, a reservoir of financial resources, the favoured residence of the great and powerful, the