Exchange, I heard it ascribed to the cheapness of coal, iron, and wood; to river improvement, reconstructed streets, manufactures, and even to politics. All these are parts of the reason, the whole of which carries us back to the late war. In the war-time the streets of St. Louis were green with grass because the tributary country was cut off. After the war, and until ten years ago, the tide of immigration was composed of the hardy races of northern Europe, who were seeking their own old climate in the New World. Chicago was the great gainer among the cities. That tide from northern Europe not only built up Chicago, but it poured into the now well-settled region around it, where are found such cities as St. Paul, Minneapolis, Duluth, Milwaukee, Omaha, and a hundred considerable places of lesser size. It was a consequence of climatic and, to a less extent, of political and social conditions, and it caused St. Louis to stand still. But for the past ten years the tide of immigration has been running into the Southwest, into Missouri, and the country south and southwest of it.

St. Louis is commonly spoken of as the capital of the Mississippi Valley, but her field is larger. It is true that there is no other large city between her and New Orleans a distance of 800 miles - but there is no other on the way to Kansas City, 283 miles; or to Chicago, 280 miles; or for a long way east or southwest. Her tributary territory is every State and city south of her; east of her, to the distance of 150 miles; north, for a distance of 250 miles; and in the west and southwest as far as the Rocky Mountains.

Between 1880 and 1890 the State of Missouri gained more than half a million of inhabitants; Arkansas gained 326,000; Colorado, 300,000; Kansas, 430,000; Kentucky, 200,000; Nebraska, 600,000; Texas, 640,000; Utah, 64,000; New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma, 114,000. Here, then, was a gain of 3,174,000 in population in St. Louis's tributary country, and this has not only been greatly added to in the last two and a half years, but it leaves out of account the growth in population of the States of Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Louis had 350,518 souls in 1880; now she calls herself a city of half a million inhabitants. Her most envious critics grant that she has 470,000 souls. In 1891 per

St.

mits were granted for 4435 new buildings, to cost $13,259,370, only eleven hundred thousand dollars of the sum being for wooden houses.

The city now has 347 miles of paved streets, and they are no longer the streets of crumbling limestone, which once almost rendered the place an abomination. They now are as fine thoroughfares as any city possesses, 272 miles being of macadam, 41 of granite blocks, and the rest being mainly of wooden blocks, asphaltum, and other modern materials. A system of boulevards, of great extent and beauty, is planned and begun. New waterworks are being constructed beyond the present ones at a cost of four millions of dollars, but with the result that a daily supply of one hundred millions of gallons will be insured. The principal districts of the city are now electrically lighted. A new million dollar hotel is promised.

The old city, with its stereotyped forms of dwellings and stores, is being rapidly rebuilt, and individual tastes, which search the world for types, are dominating the new growth. The new residence quarters, where the city is reaching far from the river in the vicinage of the great parks, are very pretty and open, and are embellished with a great number of splendid mansions. In the heart of the city are many high modern office buildings. They are not towering steeples, as in Chicago, nor are they massed together. They are scattered over the unusually extended business district, and in their company is an uncommon number of very large and substantial warehouses, which would scarcely attract the eye of a New-Yorker, because they form one of the striking resemblances St. Louis, both new and old, bears to the metropolis. The most conspicuous of the office buildings are distinguished for their massive walls and general strength. Beside some of the Chicago and Minneapolis buildings of the same sort they appear dark and crowded, and are rather more like our own office piles, where room is very highpriced. But they are little worlds, like their kind in all the enterprising towns, having fly-away elevators, laundry offices, drug shops, type-writers' headquarters, barber shops, gentlemen's furnishing shops, bootblacks' stands, and so on.

But in praising the new orders of architecture in St. Louis I do not mean to condemn all of the old. The public and

semi-public edifices of its former eras should be, in my opinion, the pride of her people. That cultivated taste which led to the revival of the pure and the classic in architecture, especially in the capitals of the Southern States, found full expression in St. Louis, and it commands praise from whoever sees such examples of it as the Court-house, the old Cathedral, and several other notable buildings. What was ugly in old St. Louis was that cutand-dried uniformity in storehouses and dwellings which once made New York tiresome and Philadelphia hideous.

But to return to the size and growth of the city. It reaches along the river-front 19 miles. It extends six and sixty-two one-hundredth miles inland, and it contains 40,000 acres, or 61.37 square miles. This immense territory is well served by a great and thoroughly modern system of surface street railways, having more than 214 miles of tracks, and run almost entirely by electric and cable power. Some of the newer cars in use on the electric roads are as large again as our New York street cars, and almost half as large as steam railway coaches. Their rapid movements, their flashing head-lights at night, and the cling-clang of the cracked-sounding gongs in the streets seem to epitomize the rush and force of Western development. There is an element of sorcery in both of themin modern progress and in the electric cars. Was it not Dr. Holmes who likened those cars to witches flying along with their broomsticks sweeping the air?

If Chicago was not the first, it was at least a very early railway centre in the West, and her citizens are right in ascribing to that fact much of her prosperity. To-day St. Louis has become remarkable as a centring-place of railways. The city is like a hub to these spokes of steel that reach out in a circle, which, unlike that of most other towns of prominence, is nowhere broken by lake, sea, or mountain chain. Nine very important railroads and a dozen lesser ones meet there. The mileage of the roads thus centring at the city is 25,678, or nearly 11,000 more than in 1880, while the mileage of roads that are tributary to the city has grown from 35,000 to more than 57,000. These railways span the continent from New York to San Francisco. They reach from New Orleans to Chicago, and from the Northwestern States to

Florida. Through Pullman cars are now run from St. Louis to San Francisco, to the city of Mexico, and to St. Augustine and Tampa in the season. New lines that have the city as their objective point are projected, old lines that have not gone there are preparing to build connecting branches, and several of the largest systems that reach there are just now greatly increasing their terminal facilities in the city with notable works and at immense cost. The new railway bridge across the river is yet a novelty, but it is to be followed at once by a union depot, which is promised to be the most commodious passenger station in the world. It will embrace all the latest and most admirable concomitants of a first-class station. It will be substantial and costly, and will follow an architectural design which will render it a public orna

ment.

But St. Louis is something besides the focal point of 57,000 miles of railways. She is the chief port in 18,000 miles of inland waterways. She is superior to the nickname she often gets as the mere "capital of the Mississippi Valley," but her leading men have never been blind to the value of that mightiest of American waterways as a medium for the transportation of non-perishable and coarse freights, and as a guarantor of moderate freight rates. The Merchants' Exchange of St. Louis has for twenty years been pressing the government to expend upon the improvement of this highway such sums as will render it navigable at a profit at all times. The government has greatly bettered the condition of the river, but it will require a large expenditure and long-continued work to ensure a fair depth all along the channel at low water. What is wanted is a ten-foot channel. Now it drops to five feet and a half, and even less where there are obstructions in the form of shoals and bars. It is argued that the improvement asked for would so reduce the cost of freighting on the river as to bring to the residents of the valleys of the river and its tributaries a gain that would be greater than the cost of the work. In the language of a resolution offered in Congress by Mr. Cruise, of Kansas, "it would reclaim an area of lands equal to some of the great States, and so improve the property of the people and increase their trade relations with other sections of the United

States, and improve the condition of our foreign trade, as to benefit every interest and every part of the whole country."

This year the Exchange and the city government, with the leading industrial bodies of the city, sent a memorial to Congress which they called "a plea in favor of isolating the Mississippi River, and making it the subject of an annual appropriation of $8,000,000 until it shall be permanently improved for safe and useful navigation." They said that the removal of a snag or a rock anywhere between Cairo and New Orleans extends relief to Pittsburg, Little Rock, Nashville, and Kansas City. This is because the stream runs past and through ten States, and (with its tributaries) wa ters and drains, wholly or in part, more than one-half the States and Territories of the Union.

After proving that 28,000,000 persons inhabit the region directly interested in the improvement of the river, the memorialists proceed to show that the railroads in 1890 carried freight at .941 cents per ton per mile, and that this amounted to $11 29 for 1200 miles, the distance between Boston or New Orleans and St. Louis, whereas the river rate for that dis tance was $2 20 a ton. They show that whereas it cost 42 cents to send a bushel of wheat by rail from Chicago to New York in 1868, the rate had decreased in 1891 to .941 of a cent. This saving to the people was not brought about solely by competition among the railroads; the competition of the water lines with the railroads also influenced the reduction. Upon the basis of an estimate that fifty millions of dollars must be spent upon the river, they offer other reasons for believing that the money will be well spent. They assert that before the jetties deepened the mouth of the river, only half a million bushels of wheat were annually exported to Europe from New Orleans. Now eighteen millions of bushels are shipped thus, and the amount is increasing. Had that wheat not gone by that route at the rate of 14 cents a bushel from St. Louis to Liverpool, it must have been sent by rail to New York at 21 cents a bushel-a -a difference of seven cents a bushel in favor of the river route, or a saving of $1,260,000 on the annual shipment of wheat alone. The census figures of 1890 show that the amount of freight carried on the river and its trib

It is

utaries in 1889 was 31,000,000 tons. impossible to here follow the arguments and pleas that are embodied in the memorial, but it is well to know that they are not the outcome of the interests and ambition of St. Louis alone, but of the entire region which makes use of the now erratic, destructive, and uncertain river. What St. Louis asks is what New Orleans wants, and this is what Memphis, Vicksburg, Cairo, and the masses of the people in several large and populous States believe should be granted for their relief and gain.

The bill that was prepared in this interest provides that the river, from the Falls of St. Anthony to the jetties, be permanently improved under the direction of the Secretary of War and the chief engineers of the army; that $8,000,000 be appropriated for said improvement, and that a similar sum be annually expended under the direction of the Secretary of War until the river is permanently improved for safe and useful navigation.

The coal supply, which has had so much to do with the development of the new St. Louis as a manufacturing centre, comes from Illinois, the bulk of it being obtained within from ten to twenty miles of the city. St. Louis is itself built over a coal bed, and the fuel was once mined in Forest Park, though not profitably. The Illinois soft coal is found to be the most economical for making steam. It is sold in the city for from $1 15 to $1 50 a ton. The Merchants' Exchange has it hauled to its furnaces in wagons for $1 56 a ton, but Mr. Morgan, the secretary--to whom I am greatly indebted for many facts respecting the commerce of the city-says that those manufacturers who buy the same coal by the car-load get it cheaper. All southern Illinois, across the Mississippi, is covered with coal. Fifty or sixty miles farther south in that State a higher grade of bituminous coal is found, and marketed in St. Louis for household use. It is cleaner and burns with less waste, but it costs between 25 and 30 per cent.

more.

The Exposition and Music Hall Building was the subject of what was perhaps the first great expression of the renewed youth of the city. It is a monument to the St. Louis of to-day. It is said to be the largest structure used for "exposition purposes in this country since the Centennial World's Fair at Philadelphia.

It is 506 feet long, 332 feet wide, and encloses 280,000 feet of space. The history of its construction is one of those stories of popular co-operation and swift execution of which St. Louis seems likely to offer the world a volume. A fund of three-quarters of a million was raised by popular subscription six or seven years ago, and the building was finished within twelve months of the birth of the project. It is built of brick, stone, and terra-cotta, has a main hall so large that a national political convention took up only one nave in it, contains the largest music hall in the country, with a seating capacity for 4000 persons, and a smaller entertainment hall to accommodate 1500 persons. The famous pageants and illuminations which mark the carnival in that city are coincident with the opening of the exhibitions. Six of these fairs have been held in this building, each continuing forty days, and showing the manufactured products of the whole country, but principally of the Mississippi Valley. The merchants and manufacturers of St. Louis naturally make a very important contribution to the display.

I say "naturally," because this busy capital of the centre of the country and of its main internal water system has an imposing position as one of the greatest workshops and trading-points of the nation.

In the making of boots and shoes no Western city outstrips St. Louis, and her jobbing trade in these lines is enormous, and rapidly increasing. Boston, the shoe-distributing centre of the country, sent 310,500 cases of goods to St. Louis in 1891, as against 288,000 to Chicago and 284,000 to New York. The gain in the manufactured product of St. Louis was 17 per cent. last year, and in the jobbing trade it was more than 40 per cent. The Shoe and Leather Gazette of that city makes the confident prediction that, "at this rate of progress, in five years St. Louis will lead the world in the number of shoes manufactured and in the aggregate distribution of the same."

She has an enormous flour-milling interest, having sold in 1891 no less than 4,932,465 barrels of flour. Her 14 mills in the city have a capacity of 11,850 barrels a day, and her 16 mills close around the city, and run by St. Louis men and capital, grind 9850 barrels a day. The city turned out 1,748,190 barrels and the suburbs 1,542,416 barrels in 1891. In the neck

and-neck race in flour-milling between St. Louis and Milwaukee, St. Louis has recently suffered through the loss of a large. mill by fire. The figures for the two cities are, St. Louis, 1,748,190 barrels ; Milwaukee, 1,827,284 barrels. It is seen that our reciprocal treaties with the Central and South American countries and the islands off our coast will open up a large and lucrative trade in flour, as well as in many other commodities. While I was in St. Louis, in the early spring of 1892, a large shipment of flour had been made to Cuba, where the duty on that staple had been reduced from nearly five dollars to one dollar a barrel. The city exported 344,506 barrels to Europe, and sold more than two millions of barrels to supply the Southern States.

Cotton is received in St. Louis from Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Texas, and Indian Territory. It seeks that way to the East, and as much passes on as is stopped in St. Louis. It is used to a slight extent in manufactures there. A wooden-ware company in the city sells fully one-half of all that ware that is marketed in the country, and manufactures, or controls the manufacture, in many places. The largest hardware company in the country which does not make, but carries on a jobbing trade in those goods is a St. Louis institution. The saddlery and harness makers do a business of three millions; the clothingmakers have a trade of six millions; the new and growing trade in the manufacture of electrical supplies reached a value of five millions last year; four millions in wagons and carriages was an item of the city's manufactures; the making of lumber, boxes, sashes, doors, and blinds amounted to five millions; of paints, to three millions, and of printing, publishing, and the periodical press, to eight and a quarter millions. The businesses of the manufacture of iron and iron supplies, brass goods, and drugs and chemicals are all very large.

Within ten years the furniture-making industry has doubled, and there are now 57 furniture factories, employing 4000 men, and making $5,500,000 worth of goods. St. Louis is said to be the only city that increased its operations in this respect in 1891. The territory of distribution was largely extended, and now includes Mexico and the Central American States. The fact that the city is a

great hard-wood lumber market, coupled with her cheap coal, accounts for this growth. The cattle business is another line in which St. Louis, among the larger cattle depots, made a unique progress. She handled more than three-quarters of a million of cattle, nearly half a million of sheep, 1,380,000 hogs, and 55,975 horses and mules. The only falling off was in the horse and mule trade, and that was due to the supremacy of electric and cable power over horse-power on street railroads. St. Louis is still the great mule market of the country.

The city caters to human weakness by an enormous output of beer and tobacco. Of each of these luxuries she makes fourteen millions of dollars' worth annually. Here is the largest lager-beer brewery in the country, if not in the world, and the city is third in the list of brewing towns. The business excited the interest of English capital, and a syndicate bought up a great number of the breweries, but the two largest remain the property of the original companies. Twenty millions of dollars are invested in this trade, which is carried from St. Louis into every State, into Canada and Mexico, and even into Australia and Europe.

St. Louis is our biggest market for manufactured tobacco. Thus the principal depots of the trade compare with one another:

Pounds.

cial and residence districts, and with a shopping district whose windows form a perpetual world's fair. The knowledge of the value of tasteful and attractive shop-window displays always accompanies push and prosperity in a city, and in this respect none in America excels this one. Yet it offers a chance to compare modern customs in this respect with the shabby inert ways of the traders of the past. To see the contrast it is only necessary to leave the centre of Broadway and walk to where that street passes the French Market. Here is the cramped, careless untidiness of half a century ago; but the place has a distinct interest for a New-Yorker, because it is his Eighth Ward transplanted. The same low brick houses, the same dormer windows, the same cheap signs, and the stalls and stands and tiny shops that are found near Spring Street market are all repeated.

But it is easy to change one's point of view of the city, and declare it to be one of the most open, clean, and clear of settlements. This can be accomplished by going out to Grand Avenue and beyond, and riding through the dwelling districts. There one sees broad tree-lined streets, costly houses, and many beautiful semiprivate, courtlike streets that are the seats of pretty homes. In this neighborhood are the parks which are the crown and glory of the city. Some, like Forest Park, boast nature's beauties merely

bacco in the United States.

St Louis.

Fifth New Jersey District. Cincinnati..

Petersburg, Virginia..

52.214,862 22.000.000 21.000.000 18,000,000

Of plug tobacco, 44, 503,098 pounds were taxed as the city's product in 1891; of smoking tobacco, about 5,682,000 pounds; and of fine-cut chewing tobacco, 314,702 pounds. The cigars made there numbered fifty-three and a quarter millions.

St. Louis has twenty-three national and State banks and four trust companies with a joint banking capital of $29,661,075. The city is one of the two second-class national banking depositories, New York being the other, and Washington (the United States Treasury) being the one of the first-class. In the monetary strain of 1891, St. Louis developed a reserved financial strength which enabled its banks not only to supply the bare needs, but to very substantially assist other cities.

It is a comfortable and a dignified city, with every sign of wealth in its commer

VOL. LXXXV.-No. 510.-91

the blending of human taste with natural greenery and blossom adorned by statuary and fountains. But St. Louis is rich otherwise in those possessions which have elsewhere been described-her fine theatres, her clubs and churches, her great fire-proof hotel, her schools, and her old and cultivated society.

The levee along the river-side is worth a visit. It is diametrically different in itself and its atmosphere from the city that lies back of it, and that seems so familiar to a New-Yorker. It is a wide and imposing incline of stone paving, perhaps 250 feet broad. It is not Western; it is Southern. Hides, wool, cotton, and tobacco are heaped about on the wharfboats, which seem to cling to the levee with gangways that are like the antennæ of an insect. There is a line of huge oldtime river packets, looking as open and frail as bird-cages, but with towering black funnels from which jet smoke curls