"Brooklyn is a peculiar community. She differs from all others. The wits have long fed upon her. General Horace Porter has called her a city of 4,000,000, 1,000,000 of whom are alive. Another has said that there are two places to which every dead New Yorker goes, either to heaven or to hades and to Brooklyn. He may escape one or the other of the two former. He cannot escape the latter. Simeon Ford has declared that Brooklyn lies midway between the quick and the dead, midway between reckless, extravagant and wicked old New York and sober, sombre and serene Greenwood. McKinley ran for President upon the issue of the full dinner pail. The students of Princeton College recently asserted that Roosevelt was running upon the issue of a full baby carriage. The President must have secured his inspiration from the manner in which the cartoonists always pictured the Brooklyn man, behind the perambulator. We ourselves recognize that Brooklyn is peculiar and unusual. Her like is not known to the world. That fact is proved to an extent by my former assertion, that Brooklyn is the only community without municipal rank that will have here a day of her own. The fact that we are here in body and that she is here in spirit clearly shows that the old courage is still in her heart. Brooklyn may be only a borough, she may be only an 'abutment for bridges,' as President Littlejohn once feared she would become, but she is to-day the same independent Brooklyn she was back in her cityhood, and she is as proud of the things that make her great as many of the cities of the things that make them merely flashy.