numbering over 40,000. These cities, of course, have sprung up from the same causes which sustain Dantzic and Odessa; they afford an outlet for the surplus produce of the vast agricultural districts which depend upon them; manufactures have hardly contributed at all to their growth. If we reckon as civic population those only who dwell in cities or towns having at least 11,000 inhabitants each, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, two manufacturing States, with an aggregate population of only 1,142,059, have a greater civic population than these ten agricultural States, who number in the aggregate over eight millions. The civic population of the two manufacturing States is nearly one third of their whole number; that of the ten agricultural States is about one twenty-fifth of the whole. The cities in Massachusetts and Rhode Island have been created almost entirely by manufacturing enterprise, these States not being remarkable for surplus agricultural produce. Wherever there is a considerable fall of water, affording power to move machinery, there a new city springs up, though the soil in the neighborhood should be as barren as the desert of Sahara. But, under the demand for agricultural produce created by that city, the dry sand and the hard rock are converted into gardens of fruit and vegetables; while the plain of Eastern Virginia, once almost unsurpassed for fertility, its powers being now exhausted, is relapsing in part into its primitive wild condition. Cities and towns are the great agents and tokens of the increase of national opulence, and the progress of civilization. The revival of effective industry, which preceded, and in part caused, the revival of learning in Europe, took place through the agency of the free towns and great trading cities, which sprang up most numerously in Germany and Italy, where they afforded a refuge for the arts and the pursuits of peace. Their establishment was the first effective blow given to the feudal institutions of the Continent. Commerce and manufactures, to which their walls afforded protection against the chances of war and the rapacity of the warlike nobles, "gradually introduced order and good government, and with them the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbors, and of servile dependency upon their superiors. By affording a great and ready market for the rude produce of the country, they gave encouragement to its cultivation and further improvement." The word civilization itself, as if to indicate the origin and home of the thing, is derived from civis, the inhabitant of a city. Sismondi attributes the greater humanizing and civilizing influence of the colonies of the ancients over those of the moderns to the fact that the former founded cities, while the latter spread themselves over much land. In the town, man is in the presence of man, not in solitude, abandoned to himself and his passions. The history of the colonization of the borders of the Mediterranean, he says, might also be called the history of the civilization of the human race. The Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the Romans successively formed colonies upon the same general plan. Each of these nations became in succession the leaders, the masters, of the civilized world, in refinement, learning, and the arts; and the colonies which they established were the means of diffusing these blessings among the rude tribes within whose territories the new settlements were formed. When the mother country became too populous, when the inhabitants of its wallinclosed cities became straitened for room, detachments of them were sent out to found new homes for themselves on the coasts of other lands. The colony was to take care of itself, to be independent of the mother country, from the outset. Hence, to protect themselves against the savage tribes among whom they came to dwell, they were obliged, as the first step, to build a city and encircle it with fortifications. Within its walls they all slept; and they did not wander so far from its precincts during the daytime, but that they could at any hour hear the trumpet-call, which, like the alarm-bell of modern times, might summon them back to the defence of the walls. Hence they cultivated only a narrow territory, lying within sight of, or at a short distance from, the city; and to obtain food from this restricted space for their whole number, they were obliged to exhaust all the arts of cultivation upon it; it was tilled, and it bloomed, like a garden. For greater security, a portion of it was generally inclosed within the fortifications. This pomarium, or cultivated space under the walls, was usually divided into small strips, and allotted to the several heads of families among the citizens. A portion of the colonists devoted themselves to tillage, and raised food enough, or nearly enough, for the whole city. A larger portion within the walls applied themselves to the mechanic arts and to commerce, exchanging their manufactured goods for food, either with their own agricultural citizens, or with the native inhabitants of the soil, when they could open peaceful intercourse with them, or with the denizens of other shores, perhaps of the mother country, to which they sent their ships. As they needed only a narrow strip of territory, which they often obtained by fair purchase from the aborigines, the hostility of the latter was not excited; and the mutual benefits of trade being soon felt, the natives came to regard the colonists as their benefactors and best friends. A knowledge of the arts, a taste for the comforts and luxuries of life, learning and religion, were thus diffused among them; and in their simplicity and gratitude, they often reverenced the authors of their civilization as superhuman beings, and paid them divine honors. Many, if not most, of the gods and goddesses of ancient mythology were originally only the founders of art-bringing, knowledge-and-religion-diffusing colonies, whose beneficent influence, handed down to grateful remembrance by tradition,—by the spoken, not the written word,- really seemed to admiring posterity divine. The colony, the city, was opulent and refined from the beginning; founded by the most enterprising citizens of the mother country, who brought their wealth, their cultivated tastes, and their industrious and adventurous habits along with them, it became almost at once a rival of the parent city in learning, industry, and the arts. Temples and theatres were built; the drama flourished; schools of eloquence were established; manufactures of costly and elegant fabrics were begun; and commerce started into life with all the vigor of youth and the large resources of manhood. Brief as this sketch is, the classical reader will recognize in it, I think, the principal features of those colonies which the Phoenicians established along the northern shore of Africa, the Greeks along the coasts of Asia Minor, Sicily, and Magna Græcia or Southern Italy, and the Romans in Gaul and Spain. Carthage, the great commercial and manufacturing city of ancient times, the rival of Rome, may be taken in its history as a type of them all; and in the fanciful picture which, many years after its destruction, the Roman poet drew of its supposed origin, of the scene which it presented while the walls of the city were building, we recognize what was the idea, even so late as Virgil's time, of the mode of founding a colony.* Modern colonies, on the other hand, are, from the outset, dependencies of the mother country, to which they constantly look for protection and support. They are often planted by those who do not intend to reside there permanently, but simply wish to gather again in a new country the wealth which they have dissipated in an old one, and then to return to their former home in order to enjoy it. Thus relieved from all fear of attack from the aborigines, their first care is to get possession of as much land as possible, this being the most obvious and plentiful source of riches. Individuals or joint-stock companies obtain grants of land measured by the league; and their rapacity provokes the vengeance of the natives, at the same time that it leads to their own isolation and defencelessness. The territory which they acquire is out of all proportion to their wants, their physical strength, or their capital; they cultivate only here and there a very fertile spot, where the powers of the soil are soon spent by a succession of exhausting crops; and in the careless style of agriculture to which they become accustomed, through their dependence on the extent and natural richness of their land, is soon lost all remembrance of the * "Conveniunt, quibus aut odium crudele tyranni, Jamque ascendebant collem, qui plurimus urbi agricultural art and science which they brought with them from their old home. Widely separated from each other, amply supplied with food by the bounty of nature, but destitute of the manufactured articles on which depend the comforts and even the decencies of life, out of the reach of the law, and beyond the sphere of education, they rapidly approximate the condition of the savages whom they have just dispossessed. They become "squatters," "bushmen," "backwoodsmen," whose only enjoyments are hunting and intoxication, whose only schoolroom is the forest, and whose sense of justice is manifested only by the processes of Lynch law. They are doomed to the solitary, violent, brutal existence, which destroys all true civilization, all sympathy with other men, though it increases strength of body, adroitness, courage, and the spirit of adventure. The want of local attachments, and an insatiable thirst for wandering and adventure, are, I fear, the most striking traits in the character of the whole population of our Mississippi valley. Their homes even in that fair region are but homes of yesterday; they had only pitched their camps on the banks of the Ohio and the Wabash, while on their way to the Sacramento and the Columbia. The truant disposition which carried them over the Alleghanies, hurries them onward to the Rocky Mountains. I do not go so far as an eminent thinker of our own day, who has expressed in eloquent language his fears lest these constant migrations should lead our countrymen back to barbarism; but it is certain that the "pioneers of civilization," as they have been fondly called, leave laws, education, and the arts, all the essential elements of civilization, behind them. They may be the means of partially civilizing others, but they are in great danger of brutalizing themselves. Strangely enough, the only colony of modern times founded on the principles which governed the ancients in the establishment of their colonies is one commenced by a set of halfcrazed fanatics in our own far-distant territory of Utah or Deseret. Here, as well as at their former place of settlement in Illinois, the Mormons appear to have begun their colony by founding a city, within or near which their whole population is to be collected, so that the mechanic arts and all branches of manufacture may be established at the same time that they |