Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 Part 4

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 mult.i.tudes 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 a.s.sociated, astronomers tell us, to form a binary centre in the heavens, for what is, doubtless, an unseen system receiving from them impulse and light. On a scale not utterly insignificant, a parallel may be hereafter suggested in the relation of these combined cities to a part, at least, of our national system. Their att.i.tude and action during the war--successfully closed under the gallant military leadership of men whom we gladly welcome and honor--were of vast advantage to the national cause. The moral, political, intellectual temper, which dominates in them, as years go on, will touch with beauty, or scar with scorching and baleful heats, extended regions. Their religious life, as it glows in intensity, or with a faint and failing l.u.s.tre, will be repeated in answering image from the widening frontier. The beneficence which gives them grace and consecration, and which, as lately, they follow to the grave with universal benediction, or, on the other hand, the selfish ambitions which crowd and crush along their streets, intent only on acc.u.mulated wealth and its sumptuous display, or the glittering vices which they accept and set on high--these will make their impression on those who never cross the continent to our homes, to whom our journals are but names.

Surely, we should not go from this hour, which marks a new era in the history of these cities, and which points to their future indefinite expansion, without the purpose in each of us, that, so far forth as in us lies, with their increase in numbers, wealth, equipment, shall also proceed, with equal step, their progress in whatever is n.o.blest and best in private and in public life; that all which sets humanity forward shall come in them to ampler endowment, more renowned exhibition: so that, linked together, as hereafter they must be, and seeing "the purple deepening in their robes of power," they may be always increasingly conscious of fulfilled obligation to the Nation and to G.o.d; may make the land, at whose magnificent gateway they stand, their constant debtor; and may contribute their mighty part toward that ultimate perfect Human Society for which the seer could find no image so meet or so majestic as that of a City, coming down from above, its stones laid with fair colors, its foundations with sapphires, its windows of agates, its gates of carbuncles, and all its borders of pleasant stones, with the sovereign promise resplendent above it,--

"And great shall be the Peace of thy children!"