54 BERLIN : A STUDY OF 



paced countries of Europe. I have had opportunities to 

 watch the development of several of our foremost Amer- 

 ican centres during the past decade, but nowhere have I 

 witnessed mightier changes than those which the German 

 Kaiserstadt has undergone since I previously beheld it in 

 1877. Then, indeed, it was a city of much magnificence, 

 but it was in the transition state due to its recent assump- 

 tion of imperial honors, with many defects manifest to the 

 visitor, in the shape of wretched pavements of cobble-stone, 

 a bad drainage system, accompanied by a high death rate, 

 inconvenient methods of local transit, and other reminders 

 of the more provincial days before the great empire sprang 

 into existence. Berlin is one of the most splendid capitals 

 of Europe, hardly surpassed even by Paris in grandeur, and 

 with its population of a million and a half, is the second 

 city of the continent in size and the first in industrial rank. 

 It is growing with the pace of a Chicago, and every year 

 beholds enormous areas of the surrounding sand-plains cov- 

 ered densely with the new houses of the expanding city. 

 Here, in the " sandbox of Germany " amid the barren plains 

 of the old Mark Brandenburg, the cradle of the Hoheuzol- 

 lern might, the tireless energy and persistence of the Prus- 

 sians have built up the chief city of the most powerful em- 

 pire of Europe. 



Berlin is truly a model city, and should the authorities 

 of any of our great American towns really desire to learn 

 how best to make their municipalities as agreeable and con- 

 venient for their inhabitants as possible, I would earnestly 

 counsel them to make a careful study of the great German 

 capital, where everything runs like clockwork, and no one 

 system of public " improvements " is permitted to interfere 

 with the working of any other system. In consequence, 

 every thing is the best of its kind, and the manifold annoy- 

 ances attendant upon existence in a great city, and which al- 



