ast year in New
York, and with more than 200 additional miles impatiently waiting to
be paved; with 130 miles of street railway track, over which last year
88,000,000 of passengers were carried; with nearly 2,500 miles of
telegraph and telephone wire knitting it together; with 35,000,000 of
gallons of water, the best on the continent, to which 20,000,000 more
are soon to be added, daily distributed in its houses, through 360
miles of pipe; with an aggregate value of real property exceeding
certainly $400,000,000; with an annual tax levy of $6,500,000; with
manufactures in it whose reported product in 1880 was $103,000,000;
with a water-front, of pier, dock, basin, canal, already exceeding 25
miles, and not as yet half developed, at which lies shipping from all
the world, more largely than at the piers of New York; and, finally,
with what to most modern communities appears to flash as a costly but
brilliant diamond necklace, a public debt, beginning now to diminish,
it is true, but still approaching, in net amount, $37,500,000!

The child watches, in happy wonder, the swelling film of soapy water
into whose iridescent globe he has blown the speck from the bowl of
the pipe. But this amazing development around us is not of airy and
vanishing films. It is solidly constructed, in marble and brick, in
stone and iron, while the proportions to which it has swelled surpass
precedent, and rebuke the timidity of the boldest prediction. But that
which has built it has been simply the industry, manifold, constant,
going on in these cities, to which peace offers incentive and room.

Their future advancement is to come in like manner: not through a
prestige derived from their history; not by the gradual increments of
their wealth, already collected; not by the riches which they invite
to themselves from other cities and distant coasts; not even from
their beautiful fortune of location; but by prosperous manufactures
prosecuted in them; by the traffic which radiates over the country; by
the foreign commerce which, in values increasing every year, seeks
this harbor. Each railway whose rapid wheels roll hither, from East or
West, from North or South, from the rocks of Newfoundland or the
copper-deposits of Lake Superior, from the orange groves of Florida,
the Louisiana bayous, the silver ridges of the West, the Golden Gate,
gives its guaranty of growth to the still young metropolis. On the
cotton fields of the South, and its sugar plant