OUT WITH THE TIDE

Three quarters of a century ago, when Boston was one of the leading seaports of the United States, scarcely a day passed that did not see at least one clipper ship beating into the harbor with cargoes out of India and the far east. Spices and silks came from China, minerals and cocoanuts from South America.

Nowadays, however, the scene has changed. The clipper ships have disappeared and the only sailing craft that have increased in numbers are the fishing boats which are slowly drawing from Cape Ann all the glory that in former years was Gloucester's. Even though the sail has given way to the funnel, however, and cargoes are now coal and lumber instead of silk and spice, Boston's sea commerce is rapidly decreasing; freight differentials and a lack of American vessels, it would seem, are responsible for the removal of many shippers to New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, where no such unfavorable state of affairs exists. Unless conditions change, apparently, Boston as a great centre of sea traffic is doomed.

This recalls again the statement made some years ago to the effect that the only future to which New England could look forward was that of being the playground of the nation, as railroad folders alluringly express it. The Green and White Mountains so cut up the terrain that large scale agriculture is impossible; the natural water power facilities will soon be surpassed by those developed by other districts; and the geographical location is not central enough to exert a powerful effect on the course of national trade. So say the ravens.

It this is to be true, all that will remain of Boston in another fifty years will be a scattered, sleepy, ivy-covered New England town, whose emblem, one imagines, will bear the pathetic words "Sic Transit", and whose old men will have nothing to do but gather on the steps of the hotel in the evening and converse with one another of the city's departed greatness.