In the meantime many things had happened, calculated to attract public attention generally to Washington. President Monroe had proclaimed his famous doctrine, warning Europe to keep its hands off this hemisphere. President Jackson had made his fight upon the United States Bank and won it, changing the whole financial outlook of the country. The Capitol had been enlarged, and several new Government buildings started; the Smithsonian Institution had begun to make its mark in the scientific world, and the Washington Monument had risen nearly two hundred feet into the air. The long-threatened war with Mexico had come and gone, adding a rich area to our public domain. Steamships had crowded sailing vessels off the highways of commerce and become the main dependence of the Yankee navy. The Baltimore and Ohio Railway, the first successful experiment in its field, had brought what we now call the Middle West, with its grain and minerals, to within a day’s journey of the capital, and this pioneer enterprise had been followed by the opening of other rail facilities. The Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska Act had been passed, slavery had been abolished in the District of Columbia, the Underground Railroad had begun to haul its daily consignment of runaway negroes across the Canada border, the Supreme Court had rendered the Dred Scott decision, and John Brown had led his raid in the mountain country scarcely fifty miles from where the Court was sitting. Letter postage, anywhere east of the Mississippi River, had come down to a three-cent unit. The first telegraph message had been transmitted over a wire connecting Baltimore with Washington, and out of this small beginning had presently been developed a network of electric communication covering all our more thickly populated territory; while experimenters with a submarine line had effected an exchange of messages between England and the United States which proved the practicability of their enterprise. Last but not least, royalty had smiled upon us in the person of the Prince of Wales, who had passed some days as the guest of President Buchanan at the White House. Had Washington been situated elsewhere than on the border line between two sections, neither of which felt any pride in its success, or had it been governed by executives whose records were to be made or marred by the faithfulness with which they turned every opportunity to account for its welfare and reputation, we should probably have seen the capital beginning then its career as the model city of the new world. Instead, the dependence of its people, at every stage, on the favor of what was practically an alien governing body, bore natural fruit in a feeble community spirit.