ess and praise.

While no man, therefore, can measure in thought the vast
processions--40,000,000 a year, it already is computed--which shall
pass back and forth across this pathway, or shall pause on its summit
to survey the vast and bright panorama, to greet the break of
summer-morning, or watch the pageant of closing day, we may hope that
the one use to which it never will need to be put is that of war; that
the one tramp not to be heard on it is that of soldiers marching to
battle; that the only wheels whose roll it shall not be called to echo
are the wheels of the tumbrils of troops and artillery. Born of peace,
and signifying peace, may its mission of peace be uninterrupted, till
its strong towers and cables fall!

If such expectations shall be fulfilled, of mechanical invention ever
advancing, of cities and States linked more closely, of beneficent
peace assured to all, it is impossible to assign any limit to the
coming expansion and opulence of these cities, or to the influence
which they shall exert on the developing life of the country.

Cities have often, in other times, been created by war; as men were
crowded together in them the better to escape the whirls of strife by
which the unwalled districts were ravaged, or the more effectively to
combine their force against threatening foes. And it is a striking
suggestion of history that to the frightful ravages of the
Huns--swarthy, ill-shaped, ferocious, destroying--may have been due
the Great Wall of China, for the protection of its remote towns, as
to them, on the other hand, was certainly due the foundation of
Venice. The first inhabitants of what has been since that queenly
city--along whose liquid and level streets the traveler passes,
between palaces, churches, and fascinating squares, in constant
delight--its first inhabitants fled before Attila, to the flooded
lagoons which were afterward to blossom into the beauty of a
consummate art. The fearful crash of blood and fire in which Aquileia
and Padua fell smote Venice into existence.

But even the city thus born of war must afterward be built up by
peace, when the strifes which had pushed it to its sudden beginning
had died into the distant silence. The fishing industry, the
manufacture of salt, the timid commerce, gradually expanding till it
left the rivers and sought the sea, these, with other related
industries, had made Venetian galleys known on the eastern
Mediterranean before the immense rush of