in harmony,
and any efforts that are now made will not be thrown away. Had Congress
acted sooner we might have had more Washington canals, and Washington
and Georgetown street-cars, and similar Congressional "improvements,"
beginning nowhere but in ignorance or selfishness, and ending in nothing
but nuisances. The improvement of the interiors of the national grounds,
however, by the general government, is now keeping pace with that of the
exteriors by the city as nearly as is possible under present
legislation, and their superintendence has become at last an office of
some practical consequence to Washington. The general government owns
about one-half of the property in the District, and during seventy years
has expended for the improvement of the thoroughfares a little over one
million of dollars. The city during the same time has expended for the
same purpose nearly fourteen millions of dollars.

The old Washington idea seems to have consisted in finishing a city
before it was begun. To use an architectural figure, the capital of the
column has been well designed and partly carved, but the base is not yet
laid. Those characteristics which the builders thought would be a sure
foundation of greatness have proved insufficient in the past and will
prove so in the future. The infusion of new blood has done wonders
within ten years, but there is still needed the admixture of another
current. Wealth and ideality--supposed to be possessed by all who are
attracted hither--do not raise a man above material wants or fail to
multiply them. When Washington shall give her utmost attention to
satisfying the vulgarest common wants of common people, she will have
taken her first real step toward--anything. She has had enough of fog
and moonshine. She wants for a proper period the most unmitigated
materiality--not as an end, of course, but as the first means of making
something else possible. She will be made our republican Paris, if made
so at all, by the aid of the shops, the wonderful skilled labor, the
economical living of poor people, on which rested, as well as on higher
things, the splendors of the imperial Paris. The average American lady
goes to that city to buy "things," as well as to visit the Louvre, and
while the late emperor endeavored to make his capital the social centre
of the world, he did not scorn to make it a fashionable market and
foster a Palace of Industry.

That Washington is an admirable place for manufacture