In 1862 Washington was a third rate Southern city. Even its mansions were without modern improvements or conveniences, while the mass of its buildings were low, small and shabby in the extreme. The avenues, superb in length and breadth, in their proportions afforded a painful contrast to the hovels and sheds which often lined them on either side for miles. Scarcely a public building was finished. No goddess of liberty held tablary guard over the dome of the Capitol. Scaffolds, engines and pulleys everywhere defaced its vast surfaces of gleaming marble. The northern wing of the Treasury building was not even begun. Where it now stands then stood the State departments, crowded, dingy and old. Even the southern wing of the Treasury was not completed as it was begun. Iron spikes and saucers on its western side had been used to conclude the beautiful Greek ornamentation begun with the building. All public offices, magnificent in conception, seemed to be in a state of crude incompleteness. Everything worth looking at seemed unfinished. Everything finished looked as if it should have been destroyed generations before. Even Pennsylvania avenue, the grand thoroughfare of the Capital, was lined with little two and three story shops, which in architectural comeliness have no comparison with their ilk of the Bowery, New York. Not a street car ran in the city. A few straggling omnibuses and helter-skelter hacks were the only public conveyances to bear members of Congress to and fro between the Capitol and their remote lodgings. In spring and autumn the entire west end of the city was one vast slough of impassible mud. One would have to walk many blocks before he found it possible to cross a single street, and that often one of the most fashionable of the city. “The water of Tiber Creek,” which in the magnificent intentions of the founders of the city were “to be carried to the top of Congress House, to fall in a cascade of twenty feet in height and fifty in breadth, and thence to run in three falls through the gardens into the grand canal,” instead stretched in ignominious stagnation across the city, oozing at last through green scum and slime into the still more ignominious canal, which stood an open sewer and cess-pool, the receptacle of all abominations, the pest-breeder and disgrace of the city. Toward the construction of this canal the city of Washington gave $1,000,000 and Georgetown and Alexandria $250,000 each. Its entire cost was $12,000,000. It was intended to be another artery to bring the commerce of the world to Washington, and yet the Washington end of it had come to this!