willing to
gather upon our soil for its application, so far as that could be
made by the method devised and perfected within the past quarter of
a century. It was here, a thousand leagues away from the scene of the
first enterprise of the kind, that the culminating experiment was to
be tried.

[Illustration: GIRARD AVENUE BRIDGE--ONE OF THE APPROACHES TO THE
EXHIBITION GROUNDS.]

To what point on a continent as broad as the Atlantic were they to
come? The European fairs were hampered with no question of locality.
That Austria should hold hers at Vienna, France at Paris, and Britain
at London, were foregone conclusions. But the United States have a
plurality of capitals, political, commercial, historical and State.
Washington, measured by house-room and not by magnificent distances,
was too small. New York, acting with characteristic haste, had already
indulged in an exposition, and it lacked, moreover, the rich cluster
of associations that might have hallowed its claims as the "commercial
metropolis." Among the State capitals Boston alone had the needed
historical eminence, but, besides the obvious drawback of its
situation, its capacity and its commissariat resources, except for
a host of disembodied intellects, must prove insufficient. There
remained the central city of the past, the seat of the Continental
Congress, of the Convention and of the first administrations under
the Constitution which it framed--the halfway-house between North and
South of the early warriors and statesmen, and the workshop in which
the political machinery that has since been industriously filed at
home and more or less closely copied abroad was originally forged.
Where else could the two ends of the century be so fitly brought
together? Here was the Hall of 1776; the other hall that nearly two
years earlier received the first assemblage of "that hallowed name
that freed the Atlantic;" the modest building in a bed-chamber of
which the Declaration of Independence was penned; and other localities
rich with memories of the men of our heroic age.

The space of a few blocks covered the council-ground of the Union.
Those few acres afforded room enough for the beating of its political
heart for twenty-five years, from the embryonic period to that of
maturity--from the meeting of a consulting committee of subject
colonists to the establishment of unchallenged and symmetrical
autonomy.

The growth of Philadelphia from this contracted germ was o