for the prescience of a prophet rather than the plodding drudgery of the engi

neer.

New York, for instance, with all the vast resources at her command, has not been able to solve satisfactorily the foremost of the great elemental problems: How can dwellers in great cities find room to live?

If the urban citizen is to live at all he must be within convenient reach of those with whom he does business. As soon as all the land within easy walking distance of the lower end of Manhattan Island was occupied the problem of transportation was brought up.

It was as recently as 1832 that John Stephenson, a carriage builder, made the

along with a thousand of his fellows. waiting for his number to be called in its turn to get a seat on a passing omnibus. The American mind is scarcely capable of conceiving such a situation being endured without a murmur.

In London the wonder is not so much that nearly five million people have been concentrated within the 692 square miles embraced in the Metropolitan Police District as that so many can exist in such close quarters without transportation facilities that even an American street railway manager would call adequate. Within a fifteen mile radius London is more compact than New York, Chicago

or Boston. London's problem of how to provide transportation has grown to overwhelming proportions, aggravated as it is by British "conservatism."

No boom town in Western America can boast a swifter growth than Berlin. Certainly none has had great problems presented for prompt solution in more rapid succession. A mere village a century ago, Berlin, as late as 1870, was known as the worst lighted, worst drained, ugliest capital in Europe. Today a population of 1,857,000 has gathered on Berlin's twenty-eight square miles, now the cleanest and handsomest city on the continent. Yet even Berlin has its trans