bridge for railway
use, he did so in the face of the deliberate judgment of the
profession, that success would be impossible. Stephenson had condemned
the suspension principle and approved the tubular girder for railway
traffic. But it was the Nemesis of his fate, that when he came out to
approve the location of the great tubular bridge at Montreal, he
should pass over the Niagara River in a railway train, on a suspension
bridge, which he had declared to be an impracticable undertaking.

When Roebling suggested the Bridge over the East River, his ideas were
limited to the demands of the time, and controlled by the necessity
for a profitable investment. He had no expectation that the two cities
would embark in the enterprise. Indeed, in one of his letters so late
as April 14, 1860, he says, "As to the corporations of New York and
Brooklyn undertaking the job, no such hope may be entertained in our
time." In eight years thereafter, these cities had undertaken the task
upon a scale of expense far exceeding his original ideas of a
structure, to be built exclusively by private capital for the sake of
profit.

How came this miracle to pass? The war of the rebellion occurred,
delaying for a time the further consideration of Roebling's ideas.
This war accustomed the nation to expenditures on a scale of which it
had no previous conception. It did more than expend large sums of
money. Officials became corrupt and organized themselves for plunder.
In the city of New York, especially, the government fell into the
hands of a band of thieves, who engaged in a series of great and
beneficial public works, not for the good they might do, but for the
opportunity which they would afford to rob the public treasury. They
erected court-houses and armories; they opened roads, boulevards and
parks; and they organized two of the grandest devices for
transportation which the genius of man has ever conceived; a rapid
transit railway for New York, and a great highway between New York and
Brooklyn. The Bridge was commenced, but the Ring was driven into exile
by the force of public indignation, before the rapid transit scheme,
since executed on a different route by private capital, was
undertaken. The collapse of the Ring brought the work on the Bridge to
a stand-still.

It was a timely event. The patriotic New Yorker might well have
exclaimed, just before this great deliverance, in the words of the
Consul of ancient Rome, in Macaulay's stirring