Its gigantic mysteries are no more.
Its circumnavigation is commonplace. The kinetoscope comes to aid the
phonograph to make pictures of action and lasting records of music and
of speech. The people of coming generations are to hear the voices that
have charmed or awed, persuaded, bewitched or commanded, in departed
centuries. There will be libraries of rolls, storing for all time these
treasures; rolls not unlike those cylinders preserved in the Babylonish
deserts. Photography is bringing to us, as on parchment leaves painted
with sunlight, the secrets of the depths of the seas and the skies; it
is finding new stars, and with the telescopic camera likenesses may be
snatched across spaces impenetrable by the naked eye. The aristocracy of
intelligence becomes a democracy for the diffusion of the knowledge of
the history of the day, which is the most important chapter that has
been written, impartial, instantaneous, and is becoming universal.

This is more than a new country; it is a new world. Our own farmers are
in competition with those of Egypt, India, Russia and Argentina.
Australia with her wool and beef and mutton, Egypt and India with cotton
and wheat, South America, Africa and Asia, made fruitful with resources,
seek the same markets with our producers; and the mills of Old England
are within a few cents and hours, in cost of transportation and time, as
cheap and nigh as those of New England to New York. Once, a war between
Japan and China would have been so remote that, as they say in the
newspapers, there could have been no news in it; but it means matter of
business for us now. With the novel conditions, there come upon us new
and enormous problems for solution, and responsibilities that cannot be
evaded. Once, we were an isolated nation. There was no trouble about
becoming involved in the "entangling alliances" that were the cause of
alarm to the Father of his Country. Now, the ends of the earth are in
our neighborhood, and we touch elbows with all the races of mankind, and
all the continents and the islands are a federation. The newspapers are,
to continue the poetic prophecy, "the parliament of man."

The drift of human experience is to increased aggregations, to
concentration and to centralization. This mighty city, in her material
grandeur, and, we may trust, her moral redemption, stands for forty-six
indestructible States and one indivisible nation. Her lofty structures
far surpass already the palaces o