was forty-four years: in the laboring-class it was twenty-two years. Filth and bad ventilation cost England more lives annually than she had lost by death in battle or by wounds during the bloodiest year of her history. The annual waste of adult life from causes which ought to be removed was estimated at from thirty to forty thousand.” Food is abundant and of great variety in our favored land, and the canning industry supplies the luscious fruits of summer at low prices throughout the entire year. One noteworthy feature of the progress of the last fifty years is that it touches all classes; the workingman especially shares largely its advantages. The general and rapid diffusion of knowledge, by means of the greatly improved press, is one of the marvels of this most wonderful age. The “Hoe” octuple press can print 96,000 copies of a newspaper per hour, or 1600 every minute; the paper travels through the press at the rate of 32½ miles an hour; is printed, pasted, cut, folded, counted, and delivered in bundles of twenty-five, automatically. Three of these presses would be able to print 748,000 eight-page sheets, equal to forty-two tons per hour of printed matter. Mr. Plant might stand on the roof of his office at Twenty-third Street in New York City, and say, “How changed is this city since I first saw it when a boy.” It had no horse-cars, no trolley-cars, no cable-cars, no elevated roads, no large hotels, no buildings of more than three stories in height, few stores more than twenty-five feet wide. It had no telegraph, telephone, phonograph, or electric lights,--only oil lamps,--no asphalt pavements. No steam-cars, no photograph galleries, no sewing-machines or type-writers, or bicycles, or horseless carriages, or public baths. No time-lock safes, stem-winding watches. No submarine cables, or Bessemer steel, or great suspension bridges. In 1820, the population of New York City was only 123,706; now it is over a million and a half. In the same time he has seen the population of the country grow from 9,628,131, (of whom 1,528,064 were slaves) to upwards of 70,000,000, and he has seen the inauguration of nineteen of the twenty-five Presidents of the United States. The territory of the United States has nearly doubled during his lifetime, and its accumulated wealth can hardly be measured during the same period. The development of our coal mines, iron mines, gold and silver mines, oil wells, natural gas stored up in the bowels of the earth--these, too, have made giant strides. The great railroad industries of the country, furnishing work for hundreds of thousands; the increase and enlargement of our manufactories, the great cities that have been built, some of them burned and rebuilt, as was the case with Boston, Portland, and Chicago; all these have added to the enormous wealth of the nation. In 1831, a dozen families around Fort Dearborn formed the nucleus of the present city of Chicago. Minneapolis this summer removed its first house, built