“BOOMING” IN AMERICA.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2456, 26 January 1893, Page 3

“BOOMING” IN AMERICA.

Mr Julian Ralph, a well-known writer to leading magazines, gives some interesting facts regarding the manner in which “ booming ” is carried on in the States : Long ago have the American business men ceased to look to their Government for aid in developing the resources of their country. When they have any money to spend it goes not in making good bridges or harbors, but in buying the votes of the silver miners or the army of pensioners they now support. So the business men have been thrown upon their own resources. His special theme is St. Louis, and he gives a list of the addition to the population of its tributary States in the decade of 1880 1890 of nearly three-quarters of a million people. In St. Louis, he says, we see a city managed by its people as a wideawake modern merchant looks after his business. It is advertised and written up mid pushed upon the attention of the world with all its good features clearly and proudly set forth. He is candid enough, to say there is boasting in the process, but it is always placed on actual merit for St. Louis is an old and proud city, and there is no begging at all. The methods, he says, are distinctly legitimate, and the work accomplished is hard work paid for by hard cash. It is considered a shrewd investment and not a speculation. Speaking as an Eastern, he says, “if we in the Eastern cities who are said to be fossilized are not induced to imitate such a remarkable example of enterprise, we cannot help admiring the concord and heavy local pride from which it springs.” The Secretary of the St. Louis Bureau of Information reports that it is causing the publication of half-page advertisements of St. Louis precisely as if it were a business or a patent medicine, in 62 papers, circulating more than a million copies ; that arrangements are made for a weekly mail letter to 500 Southern and Western journals, and that once or twice a week news items are sent to the principal dailies of the whole continent. It is also getting up a rich ami notable book to be called “ St. Louis Through a Camera ” for circulation amongst all English speaking people,