"Local and particular as is the work, therefore, it represents that fellowship of the nations which is more and more prominently a fact of our times, and which gives to these cities incessant augmentation. When by and by on yonder island the majestic French statue of 'Liberty' shall stand, holding in its hand the radiant crown of electric flames, and answering by them to those as brilliant along this causeway, our beautiful bay will have taken what specially illuminates and adorns it from Central and from Western Europe. The distant lands from which oceans divide us, though we touch them each moment with the fingers of the telegraph, will have set their conspicuous double crown on the head of our harbor. The alliances of nations, the peace of the world, will seem to find illustrious prediction in such superb and novel regalia. Friends and fellow-citizens, let us not forget that in the growth of these cities, henceforth united and destined ere long to be formally one, lies either a threat or one of the most conspicuous promises of the time. Cities have always been powers in history. Athens educated Greece as well as adorned it, while Corinth filled the throbbing and thirsty Hellenic veins with poisoned blood. The weight of Constantinople broke the Roman Empire asunder. The capture of the same magnificent city gave to the Turks their establishment in Europe for the following centuries. Even where they have not had such a commanding preëminence of location, the social, political, moral force proceeding from cities has been vigorous, in impression, immense in extent. The passion in Paris, for a hundred years, has created or directed the sentiment of France. Berlin is more than the legislative or administrative centre of the German Empire, and even a government as autocratic as that of the Czar, in a country as undeveloped as Russia, has to consult the popular feeling of St. Petersburg or of Moscow. In our nation, political power is widely distributed, and the largest or wealthiest commercial centre can have but its share. Great as is the weight of the aggregate vote in these henceforth compacted cities, the vote of the State will always overbear it. Amid the suffrages of the nation at large it can only be reckoned as one of many consenting or conflicting factors. But the influence which constantly proceeds from these cities--on their journalism not only, or on the issues of their book presses, or on the multitudes going forth from them--but on the example presented in them, of educational, social, religious life--this, for shadow and check, or for fine inspiration, is already of unlimited extent, of incalculable force. It must increase as they expand, and are lifted before the country to a new elevation. A larger and a smaller sun