So those who have lived in this city from childhood, and who hardly yet claim the dignities of age, could scarcely have conjectured, when looking on what Mr. Murphy recalled as the village of his youth, "a hamlet of a hundred houses," that it should have become, in our time, a city of nearly 70,000 dwelling houses, occupied by twice as many families; with a population, by the census rates, of little less than 700,000; with more than 150,000 children in its public and private schools; with 330 miles of paved streets, as many as last year in New York, and with more than 200 additional miles impatiently waiting to be paved; with 130 miles of street railway track, over which last year 88,000,000 of passengers were carried; with nearly 2,500 miles of telegraph and telephone wire knitting it together; with 35,000,000 of gallons of water, the best on the continent, to which 20,000,000 more are soon to be added, daily distributed in its houses, through 360 miles of pipe; with an aggregate value of real property exceeding certainly $400,000,000; with an annual tax levy of $6,500,000; with manufactures in it whose reported product in 1880 was $103,000,000; with a water-front, of pier, dock, basin, canal, already exceeding 25 miles, and not as yet half developed, at which lies shipping from all the world, more largely than at the piers of New York; and, finally, with what to most modern communities appears to flash as a costly but brilliant diamond necklace, a public debt, beginning now to diminish, it is true, but still approaching, in net amount, $37,500,000! The child watches, in happy wonder, the swelling film of soapy water into whose iridescent globe he has blown the speck from the bowl of the pipe. But this amazing development around us is not of airy and vanishing films. It is solidly constructed, in marble and brick, in stone and iron, while the proportions to which it has swelled surpass precedent, and rebuke the timidity of the boldest prediction. But that which has built it has been simply the industry, manifold, constant, going on in these cities, to which peace offers incentive and room.