our beautiful bay will have taken what specially illuminates
and adorns it from Central and from Western Europe. The distant lands
from which oceans divide us, though we touch them each moment with
the fingers of the telegraph, will have set this conspicuous double
crown on the head of our harbor. The alliances of nations, the peace
of the world, will seem to find illustrious prediction in such superb
and novel regalia.

Friends, and Fellow-Citizens: Let us not forget that, in the growth of
these cities, henceforth united, and destined ere long to be formally
one, lies either a threat, or one of the conspicuous promises of the
time.

Cities have always been powers in history. Athens educated Greece, as
well as adorned it, while Corinth filled the throbbing and thirsty
Hellenic veins with poisoned blood. The weight of Constantinople broke
the Roman Empire asunder. The capture of the same magnificent city
gave to the Turks their establishment in Europe for the following
centuries. Even where they have not had such a commanding pre-eminence
of location, the social, political, moral force proceeding from cities
has been vigorous in impression, immense in extent. The passion of
Paris, for a hundred years, has created or directed the sentiment of
France. Berlin is more than the legislative or administrative centre
of the German Empire. Even a government as autocratic as that of the
Czar, in a country as undeveloped as Russia, has to consult the
popular feeling of St. Petersburg or of Moscow.

In our nation, political power is widely distributed, and the largest
or wealthiest commercial centre can have but its share. Great as is
the weight of the aggregate vote in these henceforth compacted cities,
the vote of the State will always overbear it. Amid the suffrages of
the nation at large, it can only be reckoned as one of many consenting
or conflicting factors. But the influence which constantly proceeds
from these cities--on their journalism, not only, or on the issues of
their book-presses, or on the multitudes going forth from them, but on
the example presented by them of intellectual, social, religious
life--this, for shadow and check, or for fine inspiration, is already
of unlimited extent, of incalculable force. It must increase as they
expand, and are lifted before the country to a new elevation.

A larger and a smaller sun are sometimes associated, astronomers tell
us, to form a binary centre in the heavens, for wha