Chapter 5

Such a popular achievement is one to be proud of. St. Petersburg could be commenced 180 years ago--almost to a day, on May 27th, 1703--and could afterward be built, by the will of an autocrat, to give him a new centre of empire, with a nearer outlook over Europe; its palaces rising on artificial foundations, which it cost, it is said, 100,000 lives in the first year to lay. Paris could be reconstructed, twenty-five years ago, by the mandate of an emperor, determined to make it more beautiful than before, to open new avenues for guns and troops, to give to its laborers, who might become troublesome, desired occupation. But not only have these cities of ours been founded, built, reconstructed by the people, but this charming and mighty avenue in the air, by which they are henceforth rebuilt into one, is to the people's honor and praise. It shows what multitudes, democratically organized, can do if they will. It will show, to those who shall succeed us, to what largeness of enterprise, what patience of purpose, what liberal wisdom, the populations now ruling these associated cities were competent in their time. It takes the aspect, as so regarded, of a durable monument to Democracy itself.

We congratulate the Mayors of both the cities, with their associates in the government of them, on the public spirit manifested by both, on the ampler opportunities offered to each, and on those intimate alliances between them which are a source of happiness to both, and which are almost certainly prophetic of an organic union to be realized hereafter. And we trust that the crosses, encircled by the laurel wreath, on the original seal of New Amsterdam, with the Dutch legend of this city, "Union makes Strength," may continue to describe them, whether or not stamped upon parchments and blazoned on banners, as long as human eyes shall see them.

The work now completed is of interest to both cities, and its enduring and multiplying benefits will be found, we are confident, to be common, not local.

We who have made and steadfastly kept our homes in Brooklyn, and who are fond and proud of the city--for its fresh, bracing, and healthful air, and the brilliant outstretch of sea and land which opens from its Heights; for its scores of thousands of prosperous homes; for its unsurpassed schools, its co-operating churches, the social temper which pervades it, the independence and enterprise of its journals, and the local enthusiasms which they fruitfully foster; for its general liberality, and the occasional splendid examples of individual munificence which have given it fame; for its recent but energetic institutions, of literature, art, and a noble philanthropy; and for the stimulating enterprise and culture of the young life which is coming to command in it--we have obvious reason to rejoice in the work which brings us into nearer connection with all that is delightful and all that is enriching in the metropolis, and with that diverging system of railways, overspreading the continent, which has in the commercial capital its natural centre of radiation.

We have no word of criticism to speak, only words of most hearty admiration, for the safe and speedy water-service on the lines of the ferries which has given us heretofore such easy transportation from city to city, without delays that were not unavoidable, and with remarkable exemption from disaster. So far as human carefulness and skill could assure safety and speed, in the midst of conditions unfriendly to both, the management of these ferries has been peerless, their success unsurpassed. To them is due, in largest measure, the rapid growth already here realized. They have formed the indispensable arteries, of supply and transmission, through which the circulating life-blood has flowed, and their ministry to this city has been constant and vital. But we confess ourselves glad to reach, with surer certainty and a greater rapidity, the libraries and galleries, the churches and the homes, as well as the resorts of business and of pleasure, with which we are now in instant connection; and the horizon widens around us as we touch with more immediate contact the lines of travel which open hence to the edges of the continent.

If we have not as much to offer in immediate return, we have, at least, a broad expanse of uncovered acres within the city, for the easy occupation of those who wish homes, either modest or splendid, or who shall wish such as the growth of the metropolis multiplies its population into the millions, crowds its roofs higher toward the stars, and makes a productive silver mine of each several house-lot. And to those who visit us but at intervals we can open not only yonder park, set like an emerald in the great circular sweep of our boundaries from the waters of the Narrows to the waters of the Sound, but also their readiest approach to the ocean. The capital and the sea are henceforth brought to nearer neighborhood. Long Island bays, and brooks, and beaches, are within readier reach of the town. The winds that have touched no other land this side of Cuba are more accessible to those who seek their tonic breath. The long roll of the surf on the shore breaks closer than before to office and mansion, and to tenement chamber.

The benefits will, therefore, be reciprocal, which pass back and forth across this solid and stately frame-work; and both cities will rejoice, we gladly hope, in the patience and labor, the disciplined skill, the large expenditure, of which it is the trophy and fruit. New York has now the unique opportunity to widen its boundaries to the sea, and around its brilliant civic shield, more stately and manifold than that of Achilles, by the aid of those who have wrought already these twisted bracelets and clasping cables, to set the glowing margin of the Ocean-stream.

This work is important, too, we cannot but feel, in wider relations; for what it signifies, as for what it secures, and for all that it promises. Itself a representative product and part of the new civilization, one standing on it finds an outlook from it of larger circumference than that of these cities.

Every enterprise like this, successfully accomplished, becomes an incentive to others like it. It leads on to such, and supplies incessant encouragement to them. We may not know, or probably conjecture, what these are to be, in the city or the State, in the years that shall come. But, whatever they may be, for the more complete equipment of either with conditions of happiness and the instruments of progress, they will all take an impulse from that which here has been accomplished. Such a trophy of triumph over an original obstacle of Nature will not contribute to sleep in others; and whatever is needed of material improvement, throughout the State of which it is our pride to be citizens, will be only more surely and speedily supplied because of this impressive success.

It is, therefore, most fitting to our festival that we are permitted to welcome to it the Chief Magistrate of the State, with those representing its different regions in the legislative councils. We rejoice to remember that the work before us has been assisted by the favoring action of those heretofore in authority in the State; and we trust that to those now holding high offices in it, who are present to-day, the occasion will be one of pleasant experience, and of enlarged and reinforced expectation.

Indeed, it is not extravagant to say that the future of the country opens before us, as we see what skill and will can do to overleap obstacles, and make nature subservient to human designs. So we gladly welcome these eminent men from other States; while the presence of the Executive Head of the Nation, and of some of the members of his Cabinet, is appropriate to the time, as it is an occasion of sincere and profound gratification to us all. Without the concurrence of the National Government, this structure, though primarily of local relations, as reaching across these navigable waters, could not have been built. We feel assured that those honorably representing that Government, who favor its completion with their attendance, and in whose presence political differences are forgotten, will share with us in the joyful pride with which we regard it, and in the inspiring anticipation that the physical apparatus of civilization in the land is to take fresh impulse, not impediment or hindrance, from that which here has been effected. The day seems brought distinctly nearer when the Nation, equipped with the latest implements furnished by science, shall master and use as never before its rich domain.

Not only the modern spirit is here, even in eminence, which dares great effort for great advantage; but the chiefest of modern instruments is here, which is the ancient untractable iron, transfigured into steel.

It was a sign, and even a measure, of ancient degeneracy, when the age of Gold was followed if not forgotten by one of Iron. Decadence of arts, of learning and laws, of society itself, was implied in the fact. The more intrepid intelligence, the more versatile energy, amid which we live, have achieved the success of combining the two: so that while it is true now, as of old, that "no mattock plunges a golden edge into the ground, and no nail drives a silver point into the plank," it is also true that, under the stimulus of the larger expenditure which the added supplies of gold make possible, the duller metal has taken a fineness, a brightness and hardness, with a tensile strength, before unfamiliar.

The iron, as of old, quarries the gold, and cuts it out from river-bed and from rock. But, under the alchemy which gold applies, the iron takes nobler properties upon it. Converted into steel, in masses that would lately have staggered men's thoughts, it becomes the kingliest instrument of peoples for subduing the earth. Things dainty and things mighty are fashioned from it in equal abundance:--gun-carriage and cannon, with the solid platforms on which they rest; the largest castings, and heaviest plates, as well as wheel, axle, and rail, as well as screw or file or saw. It is shaped into the hulls of ships. It is built alike into column and truss, balcony, roof, and springing dome. To the loom and the press, and the boiler from whose fierce and untiring heart their force is supplied, it is equally apt; while, as drawn into delicate wires, it is coiled into springs, woven into gauze, sharpened into needles, twisted into ropes; it is made to yield music in all our homes; electric currents are sent upon it, along our streets, around the world; it enables us to talk with correspondents afar, or it is knit, as before our eyes, into the new and noble causeways of pleasure and of commerce.

I hardly think that we yet appreciate the significance of this change which has passed upon iron. It is the industrial victory of the century, not to have heaped the extracted gold in higher piles, or to have crowded the bursting vaults with accumulated silver, but to have conferred, by the sovereign touch of scientific invention, flexibility, grace, variety of use, an almost ethereal and spiritual virtue, on the stubbornest of common metals. The indications of physical achievement in the future, thus inaugurated, outrun the compass of human thought.

Two bridges lie near each other, across the historical stream of the Moldau, under the shadow of the ancient and haughty palace at Prague--the one the picturesque bridge of St. Nepomuk, patron of bridges throughout Bohemia, of massive stone, which occupied a century and a half in its erection, and was finished almost four centuries ago, with stately statues along its sides, with a superb monument at its end, sustaining symbolic and portrait figures; the other an iron suspension-bridge, built and finished in three years, a half century since, and singularly contrasting, in its lightness and grace, the sombre solidity of the first. It is impossible to look upon the two without feeling how distinctly the different ages to which they belong are indicated by them, and how the ceremonial and military character of the centuries that are past has been superseded by the rapid and practical spirit of commerce.

But the modern bridge is there a small one, and rests at the centre on an island and a pier. The structure before us, the largest of its class as yet in the world, in its swifter, more graceful, and more daring leap from bank to bank, across the tides of this arm of the sea, not only illustrates the bolder temper which is natural here, the readiness to attempt unparalleled works, the disdain of difficulties in unfaltering reliance on exact calculation, but, in the material out of which it is wrought, it shows 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 constitution, it becomes a noble, visible symbol of that benign Peace amid which its towers and roadway have risen, and which, we trust, it may long continue to signalize and to share.

We may look at this moment on the site of the ship-yard from which, in March, 1862, twenty-one years ago, went forth the unmasted and raft-like "Monitor," with its flat decks, its low bulwarks, its guarded mechanism, its heavy armament, and its impenetrable revolving turret, to that near battle with the "Merrimac," on which, as it seemed to us at the time, the destiny of the nation was perilously poised. The material of which the ship was wrought was largely that which is built in beauty into this luxurious lofty fabric. But no contrast could be greater among the works of human genius than between the compact and rigid solidity into which the iron had there been forged and wedged and rammed, and these waving and graceful curves, swinging downward and up, almost like blossoming festooned vines along the perfumed Italian lanes; this alluring roadway, resting on towers which rise like those of ancient cathedrals; this lace-work of threads, interweaving their separate delicate strengths into the complex solidity of the whole.

The ship was for war, and the Bridge is for peace:--the product of it; almost, one might say, its express palpable emblem, in its harmony of proportions, its dainty elegance, its advantages for all, and its ample convenience. The deadly raft, floating level with waves, was related to this ethereal structure, whose finest curves are wrought in the strength of toughest steel. We could not have had this except for that unsightly craft, which at first refused to be steered, which bumped headlong against our piers, which almost sank while being towed to the field of its fame, and which, at last, when its mission was fulfilled, found its grave in the deep over whose waters, and near their line, its shattering lightnings had been shot. This structure will stand, we fondly trust, for generations to come, even for centuries, while metal and granite retain their coherence; not only emitting, when the wind surges or plays through its network, that aerial music of which it is the mighty harp, but representing to every eye the manifold bonds of interest and affection, of sympathy and purpose, of common political faith and hope, over and from whose mightier chords shall rise the living and unmatched harmonies of continental gladness 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 the crusades crowded tumultuously over its quays and many bridges. Its variety of industry, and its commercial connections, turned that vast movement into another source of wealth. It rose rapidly to that naval supremacy which enabled it to capture piratical vessels and wealthy galleons, to seize or sack Ionian cities, to storm Byzantium, and make the south of Greece its suburb. Its manufactures were multiplied. Its dockyards were thronged with busy workmen. Its palaces were crowded with precious and famous works of art, while themselves marvels of beauty. St. Mark's unfolded its magnificent loveliness above the great square. In the palace adjoining was the seat of a dominion at the time unsurpassed, and still brilliant in history; and it was in no fanciful or exaggerated pride that the Doge was wont yearly, on Ascension Day, to wed the Adriatic with a ring, as the bridegroom weds the bride.

Dreamlike as it seems, equally with Amsterdam, the larger and richer "Venice of the North," it was erected by hardy hands. The various works and arts of peace, with a prosperous commerce, were the real piles, sunken beneath the flashing surface, on which church and palace, piazza and arsenal, all arose. It was only when these unseen supports secretly failed that advancement ceased, and the horses of St. Mark at last were bridled. Not all the wars, with Genoa, Hungary, with Western Europe, the Greek Empire, or the Ottoman--not earthquake, plague, or conflagration, though by all it was smitten--overwhelmed the city whose place in Europe had been so distinguished. The decadence of enterprise, the growing discredit put upon industry, the final discovery by Vasco da Gama of the passage around the Cape of Good Hope, diverting traffic into new channels--these laid their silent and tightening grasp on the power of Venice, till

"the salt sea-weed Clung to the marble of her palaces,"

and the glory of the past was merged in a gloom which later centuries have not lightened. There is a lesson and a promise in the fact.

New York itself may almost be said to have sprung from war; as the vast excitements of the forty years' wrestle between Spain and its revolted provinces gave incentive, at least, to the settlement of New Netherland. But the city, since its real development was begun, has been almost wholly built up by peace; and the swiftness of its progress in our own time, which challenges parallel, shows what, if the ministry of this peace shall continue, may be looked for in the future.