While growing into greatness, Cincinnati did not forget, in the critical times of the Civil War, its honorable history as the former outpost of the Republic. Its trade was largely with the South, but sternly its citizens decided that arguments in favor of trade interests smacked of treason, and with stoic heroism closed the city to rebellion. And when Lew Wallace, fortifying Cincinnati to anticipate attack, called for volunteers, the whole community responded, and from the Ohio valleys came the sharp-shooting "squirrel hunters" in procession seemingly endless to defend the city. [Illustration SUSPENSION BRIDGE.] Since then the growth of Cincinnati has been in keeping with the development of the nation. It does not hope, as Harriet Martineau suggested during her visit here, ever to become the home of the country's capital, but it rejoices in being the great city nearest the American centre of population. Its library of a quarter of a million volumes and its Historical Society cherish the splendid stories of its past and the accumulating data of its current achievements. Its artists and citizens delight in dignifying that record in bronze and marble in the environing parks and city squares. The visitor to Cincinnati, on a clear afternoon, should take passage on an incline road, rise to the heights of Eden Park, and traversing that high plateau, whose natural beauty and landscape gardening earn for it its name, find his way to the water tower. An elevator lifts him five hundred feet to the observatory platform, where with field-glasses he may behold the splendid panorama of Cincinnati. Far below, spanning the river over which "a crazy craft with sails and paddles" once ferried the people, he sees five massive structures of steel and stone, including the famous suspension bridge, begun in the early part of the Civil War, and by its completion during the stress of that conflict testifying eloquently to the faith of its citizens that strife was not to sever the nation, and that these mammoth girders of steel would constitute an important tie in the inevitable reunion of North and South. It was of this structure that James Parton wrote in 1867, that the whole population of Cincinnati might get upon it without danger of being let down into the water. The five superb bridges in their capacity and security afford marked contrast to the earlier attempts to span the river which floods swept away, including the arched structure which went down in the torrent of 1832, accompanied on its seaward flight by a tumbling Methodist church which the roaring Muskingum had added to the universal baptism.