Excerpt from Great Cities of the World

Ir is a somewhat ungracious task to pick and choose from among the World's metropolises a certain number to be classified as the Great Cities of the World. To the inhabitant of every busy city his own town is not only great, but the greatest. If not in population then in tradition, history or surroundings, the claim to greatness will be proudly advanced and as strenuously insisted upon, and woe unto him who seeks to dim the luster or belittle the proportions of the city's record of importance.

In this compilation, however, the editor has sought to avoid the disputed question of constructive greatness, and to base the selection rather upon the single claim to bigness as given by the census returns. Population is, after all, the one material test - even wealth and commerce standing below it in comparison. Many a goodly city of our own land should really have place in this list if the wealth of its citizens, the importance of its manufactures or its trade, and the position it holds in the ever lengthening honor-roll of progressive American cities were here to have consideration. And every such city, when compared with the sleepy, retrogressive and often tumble-down towns of the far-off Orient or of those less pushing nationalities familiarly known as the effete monarchies of Europe would surely have a better claim to the distinctive title of Great cities.

In the limited space allowed him, however, the editor has striven to do justice to all lands - with, perhaps, just a shade of favoritism toward America. The voice of the census-taker has been heard in the land even while this book has been preparing, and the relative position of the cities as given in the volume may not be in strict accord with the result of the investigations of these modern inquisitors but the endeavor has been made to make the order taken as nearly correct as possible, for not all the earth's cities are of the character of many of those Oriental towns where the census-enumerator is unknown and where the population, always estimated, has a fluctuating margin that varies from two hundred thousand to a million.

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