ows the new supremacy of man over the
metal which, in former time, he scarcely could use save for rude and
coarse implements. The steel of the blades of Damascus or Toledo is
not here needed; nor that of the chisel, the knife-blade, the
watch-spring, or the surgical instrument. But the steel of the
mediaeval lance-head or sabre was hardly finer than that which is here
built into a Castle, which the sea cannot shake, whose binding cement
the rains cannot loosen, and before whose undecaying parapets open
fairer visions of island and town, of earth, water, and sky, than from
any fortress along the Rhine. There is inexhaustible promise in the
fact.

Of course, too, there is impressively before us--installed as on this
fair and brilliant civic throne--that desire for swiftest
intercommunication between towns and districts divided from each
other, which belongs to our times, and which is to be an energetic,
enduring, and salutary force in moulding the nation.

The years are not distant in which separated communities regarded each
other with aversion and distrust, and the effort was mutual to raise
barriers between them, not to unite them in closer alliance. Now, the
traffic of one is vitally dependent on the industries of the other;
the counting-room in the one has the factory or the warehouse
tributary to it established in the other; and the demand is imperative
that the two be linked, by all possible mechanisms, in a union as
complete as if no chasm had opened between them. So these cities are
henceforth united; and so all cities, which may minister to each
other, are bound more and more in intimate combinations. Santa Fe,
which soon celebrates the third of a millenium since its foundation,
reaches out its connections toward the newest log-city in Washington
Territory; and the oldest towns upon our seaboard find allies in those
that have risen, like exhalations, along the Western lakes and rivers.

This mighty and symmetrical band before us seems to stand as the type
of all that immeasurable communicating system which is more
completely with every year to interlink cities, to confederate States,
to make one country of our distributed imperial domain, and to weave
its history into a vast, harmonious contexture, as messages fly
instantaneously across it, and the rapid trains rush back and forth,
like shuttles upon a mighty loom.

It is not fanciful, either, to feel that in all its history, and in
what is peculiar in its