in our three largest cities, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and one-fourth in the sixty-seven of our cities having a population of 100,000 or more.

Why People Drift to the Cities. In 1790, about ninetyseven people out of every hundred in this country (96.7 per cent to be exact) lived on farms or in towns of less than 2500. In 1920 but forty-eight people out of every hundred lived in the country or in towns of 2500 or less. This growth

in city population is shown for each decade in the charts above. Why have people preferred the cities?

The shift to the cities has come, first of all, because many can make more money in the cities. Very poor people have to spend most of what they make for food. But as soon as people make a living above mere subsistence, they want to buy some of the things that only skilled workmen can make. They spend more and more money for things made in city factories. As our farmers made a better living they wanted better furniture in their homes. This furniture was made in city factories. They wanted their daughters to have music lessons. But the organ or the

piano had to be made in a factory located in the city. The housewife could make a pair of homespun blue jeans that wore well, but she could not make a suit that she would want her sons to wear to college. Only coarser goods could be made on the farm; the better goods are made in the factory. Factory work takes skill. That skill is paid a good wage.

All this increasing prosperity is made possible by good transportation facilities, and by the improvement of machines in factories and on the farms so that more can be produced by less work and by fewer people.

The cities offered the attractions of good schools and good churches; paved streets; electric lights; street railways; entertainment; and crowds of people. So our immigrants stopped in the cities and many of our best youths went from the farms to try their fortunes in the cities.

Now we are trying to make the country more attractive through better roads, better schools, and better churches. The telephone and the automobile take away the lonesomeness of the farm and the radio is even more welcome on the farm than in the city. Slowly but surely country life is taking its proper place again in the well-being of our nation.

Our Nation. It is easy to think of all the people that make up our neighborhood. But it is more difficult to imagine the number of people we mean when we say that we have over one hundred mil

lion people in the United States. Yet those millions of people are bound together into a common national life by the same kind of common interests that bind the people of your own local community. The welfare of each depends upon the well-being of

others. Through trade and travel and working together we have all become one great family, and must stand or fall together.

We Master Our Environment. Men face many natural odds. The early American colonists had to contend with Indians, wild beasts, hard winters, limitless forests, and with

THE NORTHWARD TREND OF POPULATION

The black line shows how man's growing ability to contend with the forces of nature has pushed the center of population northward. Note the backward trend during the Dark Ages.

a country which they neither knew nor understood. Their salvation lay in a prompt conquest of these natural difficulties. They went to work with a will-putting up stockades, building houses, clearing land, planting crops; and later, building ships and mills, and finally, factories and warehouses. People must continue to work to overcome the forces of nature. They must conquer the elements, overcome time and space, and stamp out disease.

FAHRENHEIT

Climate presents many serious difficulties to human life. Men are obliged to protect themselves against the cold and the storms. So successful has man been in overcoming the forces of nature that the greatest civilizations of modern life have been developed in temperate rather than tropical regions. Within the last few thousand years civilization

THE WESTWARD TREND OF POPULATION

The black arrow shows how the population has steadily moved west since 1790, the date of the first census. The center of population then was 23 miles east of Baltimore. In 1920 it was at Whitehall, Owen County, Ind.,

near the Kentucky border.

has moved from the semitropical into the temperate parts of the earth. Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome have yielded the standard of progress to France, Germany, England, and the United States. The means which permit man thus to defy nature are food, clothing, and shelter.

The conquest of distance is as important as the conquest of climate. Isolation is dangerous; strangers tend to become enemies and are easily provoked to warfare. In community

life isolation is social suicide. In the Middle Ages strangers in a community were likely to be stoned or otherwise attacked when they appeared in the streets, and the local governments had to take special precautions to keep them from being injured. "Stranger" and "enemy" meant about the same thing. At one time when Flemish weavers were brought to England by the king, they were kept by themselves in well-guarded sections of the city until such time as the natives of that town could grow accustomed to having them there. Only gradually did the natives learn to welcome the stranger.

One of man's greatest achievements is the practical annihilation of distance. First he learned by the use of animals to travel more rapidly than he could travel on his own feet. Then he harnessed the wind, then steam, and later electricity and gasoline. And now he has learned to talk long distances on wires and without wires. All these devices have brought people closer together and have thus increased their ability to understand one another. At the same time these inventions have increased the dependence of people on one another.

History records no more dramatic incidents' than those