f the merchant princes of Tyre and
Venice and Liverpool, and we behold, in these imperial towers, the types
of the magnificence of the coming time. There never was so fair and
superb, ample and opulent a bride as she, in the wholesome arms of the
ocean that embrace these islands, adorned with the trophies of the
wealth of the world, and whose rulers, the slavery of crime abolished,
are the sovereign millions. These are new developments of authority, new
growths of responsibility.

The Congress, forty years ago, was a body insignificant in its relations
with the masses of the people, in comparison with what it is to-day. It
grapples, of necessity, with the new conditions, and the character of
the public service is of enlarged consequence, for it is to all the
communities and commonwealths far more comprehensive and penetrating in
its influence than in other days; and it is well the citizens of the
Republic are aroused to appreciation of their added requirements in the
care that public life must give the general welfare.

During the recent popular experience of Christian science applied to
practical politics, that resulted, among other things, in the intimacy
of representative men of the Bowery and the Fifth Avenue, that allows
the citizens of each locality to walk into the other locality at bedtime
and select their sleeping-rooms, without asking whether the folks are at
home, and to depart with or without leaving their P. P. C. cards, one of
the speakers, noting in his audience evidences of dissent, said: "If I
am speaking in a way that is prerogatory, while I want to go on, I am
willing to quit." He honored his nativity by his modesty, and was
allowed to go on; but he preferred to sit down, though his theme seemed
to him to expand under treatment, and with his new word he retired. I
quote him as a precedent and example for immediate imitation. It is more
than a joke, though, that Fifth Avenue and the Bowery have got together,
and we may hope they will work well for the good of this new country.
[Prolonged applause.]

BENJAMIN HARRISON

THE UNION OF STATES

[Speech of Benjamin Harrison at the thirteenth annual dinner of the New
England Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, December 22, 1893. In
proposing the first toast, "The President of the United States," the
Chairman, Charles Emory Smith, said: "Gentlemen, my first duty is to
give a welcome to our honored guests and a greeting to our worthy
m