50,000,000 of gallons per day. The second tunnel is seven feet in diameter, and six miles long, running four miles under the city, and can deliver 100,000,000 of gallons per day. This water is distributed through 410 miles of water mains.

The three grand engineering exploits of the city are: First, lifting the city up on jack-screws, whole squares at a time, without interrupting the business, thus giving us good drainage; second, running the tunnels under the lake, giving us the best water in the world; and, third, the turning the current of the river in its own channel, delivering us from the old abominations, and making decency possible. They redounded about equally to the credit of the engineering, to the energy of the people, and to the health of the city.

That which really constitutes the city, its indescribable spirit, its soul, the way it lights up in every feature in the hour of action, has not been touched. In meeting strangers, one is often surprised how some homely women marry so well. Their forms are bad, their gait uneven and awkward, their complexion is dull, their features misshapen and mismatched, and when we see them there is no beauty that we should desire them. But when once they are aroused on some subject, they put on new proportions. They light up into great power The real person comes out from its unseemly ambush, and captures us at will. They have power. They have ability to cause things to come to pass. We no longer wonder why they are in such high demand. So it is with our city. To the stranger it seems flat, and cheap, wooden. There is plenty of wind, and no lack of dust, and a full supply of mud. There is no grand scenery except the two seas, one of water, the other of prairie. Nevertheless, there is a spirit about it, a push, a breath, a power, that soon makes it a place never to be forsaken. soon ceases to believe in impossibilities. Balsams are the only prophets that are disappointed. The bottom that has been in the point of falling out has been there so long that it has grown fast. It cannot fall out. It has all the capital of the world itching to get inside the corporation. As when you kill a Chicago rat a hundred more will come to the funeral, so when one man falls or is crushed, a hundred large ones leap for his place.

One

When we turn our gaze towards the future-and turn it we

must, for we are all prophets, and the sons of prophets-from questioning that which is to come, we are startled with the developments that are insured by the inevitable march of events.

In the

May I tell you what I see, and be allowed to depart in peace? I must tell you. This is the purpose for which I am here. language of an old hero, I say, " Strike, but hear!”

I see Chicago in the future as the greatest city in the world. It is in league with events, and must grow to this measure. It is inland, protected from all foreign foes. It is on the productive belt of the temperate zone, where thrive all the aggressive civilizations. It is near the center of the Continent, and the center of the great valley that could support a thousand million people; and it commands more territory than any ten great cities of the world combined. The two great laws that govern the growth and size of cities are, first, the amount of territory for which they are the distributing and receiving points; second, the number of medium or moderate dealers that do this distributing. Monopolists build up themselves, not the cities. They neither eat, wear, nor live in proportion to their business. Both these laws help Chicago.

The tide of trade is eastward-not up or down the map, but across the map. The lake runs up a wing dam for five hundred miles to gather in the business. Commerce cannot ferry up there for seven months in the year, and the facilities for seven months can do the work for twelve. Then the great region west of us is nearly all good, productive land. Dropping south into the trail of St. Louis, you fall into vast deserts and rocky districts, useful in holding the world together. St. Louis and Cincinnati, instead of rivaling and hurting Chicago, are her greatest sureties of dominion. They are far enough away to give sea-room-farther off than Paris is from London-and yet they are near enough to prevent the springing up of any other great city between them.

St. Louis will be helped by the opening of the Mississippi, but also hurt. That will put New Orleans on her feet, and with a railroad running over into Texas, and so west, she will tap the streams that now crawl up the Texas and Missouri road. The current is east, not north, and a sea-port at New Orleans cannot permanently help St. Louis.

Chicago is in the field almost alone, to handle the wealth of one

fourth of the territory of this great Republic. This strip of seacoast divides its margins between Portland, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Savannah, or some other great port to be created for the South in the next decade. But Chicago has a dozen empires casting their treasures into her lap. On a bed of coal that can run all the machinery of the world for five hundred centuries; in a garden that can feed the race by the thousand years; at the head of the lakes that give her a temperature as a summer resort equalled by no great city in the land; with a climate that insures the health of her citizens; surrounded by all the great deposits of natural wealth in mines and forests and herds, Chicago is the wonder of the day, and will be The City of the future.

Fellow-citizens of Illinois, and fellow-citizens of the Republic, I am unable to eulogize the Prairie State. I have simply recited some of the facts with which her history abounds. I can do no more. There she stands, to speak for herself. Her soil, her mines, her herds, her improvements, her schools, her churches, her intelligence, her liberties, her learned professions, her war record, her heroes, her martyrs, her Presidents, and her great city-these are her glory, and shall be, so long as the nation endures. While I look into the future, the ages are rolled together; the Commonwealth of Illinois puts on purple and fine linen, and Europe and Asia, coming from the East and from the West, find their exchange in her great marts. Brothers, it remains for us to complete the marvellous record by making Illinois as good as Providence will make her great. Then she will be both the garden of the world and the garden of the Lord.

THE MEANING OF THE DECLARATION.

AN ORATION BY COL. ROBERT G. INGERSOLL,

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT PEORIA, ILLINOIS, JULY 4, 1876.

FELLOW-CITIZENS.-You have just heard read the grandest, the bravest, and the profoundest political document that was ever signed by man. It is the embodiment of physical and moral courage and of political wisdom. I say of physical courage, because it was a declaration of war against the most powerful nation then on the globe; a declaration of war by thirteen weak, unorganized colonies; a declaration of war by a few people, without military stores, without wealth, without strength, against the most powerful kingdom on the earth; a declaration of war made when the British navy, at that day the mistress of every sea, was hovering along the coast of America, looking after defenceless towns and villages to ravage and destroy. It was made when thousands of English soldiers were upon our soil, and when the principal cities of America were in the possession of the enemy. And so, I say, all things considered, it was the bravest political document ever signed by man. And if it was physically brave, the moral courage of the document is almost infinitely beyond the physical. They had the courage not only, but they had the almost infinite wisdom to declare that all men are created equal. Such things had occasionally been said by some political enthusiasts in the olden time, but for the first time in the history of the world, the representatives of a nation, the representatives of a real living, breathing, hoping people, declared that all men are created equal. With one blow, with one stroke of the pen, they struck down all the cruel, heartless barriers that aristocracy, that priestcraft, that kingcraft had raised between man and man. They struck down with one immortal blow, that infamous spirit of caste that makes a god

almost a beast, and a beast almost a god. With one word, with one blow, they wiped away and utterly destroyed all that had been done by centuries of war-centuries of hypocrisy-centuries of injustice.

What more did they do? They then declared that each man has a right to live. And what does that mean? It means that he has the right to make his living. It means that he has the right to breathe the air, to work the land, that he stands the equal of every other human being beneath the shining stars; entitled to the product of his labor-the labor of his hand and of his brain.

What more? That every man has the right to pursue his own happiness in his own way. Grander words than these have never been spoken by man.

And what more did these men say? They laid down the doctrine, that governments were instituted among men for the purpose of preserving the rights of the people. The old idea was that people existed solely for the benefit of the state-that is to say, for kings and nobles.

And what more? That the people are the source of political power. That was not only a revelation, but it was a revolution. It changed the ideas of the people with regard to the source of · political power. For the first time it made human beings men. What was the old idea? The old idea was that no political power came from, nor in any manner belonged to, the people. The old idea was that the political power came from the clouds; that the political power came in some miraculous way from heaven; that it came down to kings, and queens, and robbers. That was the old idea. The nobles lived upon the labor of the people; the people had no rights; the nobles stole what they had and divided with the kings, and the kings pretended to divide what they stole with God Almighty. The source, then, of political power was from above. The people were responsible to the nobles, the nobles to the kings, and the people had no political rights whatever, no more than the wild beasts of the forest. The kings were responsible to God: not to the people. The kings were responsible to the clouds; not to the toiling millions they robbed and plundered.

And our forefathers, in this declaration of independence, reversed this thing, and said, No; the people, they are the source of politi