To the Honorable the County Court of St. Louis County, State of Missouri: GENTLEMEN: The undersigned respectfully request that your honorable body make an appropriation for the publication and distribution of a new work by Mr. L. U. Reavis, entitled "St. Louis, the Future Great City of the World." Believing that our city is just entering upon a new era of commercial prosperity and material growth, unknown to her past history, we feel assured that, from the character and object of the work, it will, when published and circulated, add infinitely more to the material interests of St. Louis than the small sum required for its publication. The above petition was presented to the County Court of St. Louis by the following gentlemen, prominent citizens of St. Louis, who presented themselves as a committee, asking the publication of the work: The committee, having made their arguments in favor of the publication of the work, the Court voted as follows: JUDGE F. W. CRONENBOLD, in the Chair, voted aye. Making a unanimous vote of the Court in favor of the publication, and ordering ten thousand copies to be printed in English, and five thousand in German. PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT ST. LOUIS. St. Louis alone would be an all-sufficient theme; for who can doubt that this prosperous metropolis is destined to be one of the mighty centers of our mighty Republic?-CHARLES SUMNER. Fair St. Louis, the future Capital of the United States, and of the civilization of the Western Continent. [JAMES PARTON. NEW YORK TRIBUNE, } DEAR SIR: I have twice seen St. Louis in the middle of winter. Nature made her the focus of a vast region, embodying a vast area of the most fertile soil on the globe. Man will soon accomplish her destiny by rendering her the seat of an immense industry, the home of a far-reaching, ever-expanding commerce. Her gait is not so rapid as that of some of her Western sisters, but she advances steadily and surely to her predestined station of first inland city on the globe. L. U. REAVIS, Esq., Missouri. Yours, HORACE GREELEY. I also remember that I am in the city of St. Louis -destined, ere long, to be the greatest city on the continent (renewed cheers); the greatest central point between the East and the West, at once destined to be the entrepot and depot of all the internal commerce of the greatest and most prosperous country the world has ever seen; connected soon with India by the Pacific, and receiving the goods of China and Japan; draining, with its immense rivers centering here, the great Northwest, and opening into the Gulf through the great river of this nation, the Father of Waters-the Mississippi. Whenever-and that time is not far distant - the internal commerce shall exceed our foreign commerce, then shall St. Louis take the very first rank among the cities of the nation. And that time, my friends, is much sooner than any one of us at the present time actually realizes. Suppose that it had been told to you-any one of you here present, of middle age-within twenty years past, that within that time such a city should grow up here, with such a population as covers the teeming prairies of Illinois and Indiana, between this and the Ohio, who would have realized the prediction? And so the next quarter of a century shall see a larger population west of the Mississippi than the last quarter of a century saw east of the Mississippi; and the city of St. Louis, from its central location, and through the vigor, the energy, the industry, and the enterprise of its inhabitants, shall become the very first city of the United States of America, now and hereafter destined to be the great republican nation of the world.-[Extract from a speech delivered in St. Louis, October 13, 1866, by GEN. B. F. BUTLER. Now, sir, when I see this country, when I see its vastness and its almost illimitable extent; when I see the keen eye of capital and business fastened with steady, interested gaze upon the trade of the West, and all our Eastern cities in hot rivalry are reaching out their iron arms to secure our trade; when I see the railroads that are centering here in St. Louis; when I see this city, with 60,000 miles of railroad communication and 100,000 miles of telegraphic communication; when I see that she stands at the head waters of navigation, extending to the north 3,000 miles, and to the south 2,000 miles; and when I see that she stands in the center of the continent, as it were; when I see the population moving to the West in vast numbers; when I see emigration rolling toward the Pacific, and all through these temperate climes I hear the tramp of the iron horse, on his way to the Pacific Ocean; when I see towns and villages springing up in every direction; when I see States forming into existence until the city of St. Louis becomes the center, as it were, of a hundred States, the center of the population and the commerce of this country when I see all this, sir, I feel convinced that the seat of empire is to come this side of the Alleghanies; and why may not St. Louis be the future Capital of the United States of America? -[Extract from a speech of SENATOR YATES. If it were asked whose anticipations of what has been done to advance civilization, for the past fifty years, have come nearest the truth-those of the sanguine and hopeful, or those of the cautious and fearful-must it not be answered that none of the former class had been sanguine and hopeful enough to anticipate the full measure of human progress since the opening of the present century? May it not be the most sanguine and hopeful only, who, in anticipation, can attain a due estimation of the measure of future change and improvement'in the grand march of society and civilization westward over the continent? The general mind is faithless of what goes much beyond its own experience. It refuses to receive, or it receives with distrust, conclusions, however strongly sustained by facts and fair deductions, which go much beyond its ordinary range of thought. It is especially skeptical and intolerant toward the avowal of opinions, however well founded, which are sanguine of great future changes. It does not comprehend them, and therefore refuses to believe; but it sometimes goes further, and, without examination, scornfully rejects. To seek for the truth is the proper object of those who, from the past and present, undertake to say what will be in the future, and, when the truth is found, to express it with as little reference to what will be thought of it as if putting forth the solution of a mathematical problem. -[J. W. SCOTT. New York, Te b. 4 1870 Win have twice teen st. Levis in the undable of to. Notere rorade ber the focus of a vast region embarg a vost one of the most ひー an Nou wi'll soon accomplisys prodestiny by rendency bro the seat ndustry, the home of for reacting, ever expouch ing Commvel Her exitin not to robill or tot of Hew some of bed testinder beo, but the velpances steadis внеле and suvel to her. breder. bred stoten of first where at on the Elobe to the Neavis, Cor LIBRARI "Her ace Evedy Great cities grow up in nations as the mature offspring of well-directed civil and commercial agencies, and in their natural development they become vital organs in the world's government and civilization, performing the highest functions of human life on the earth. They grow up where human faculties and natural advantages are most effective. They have a part in the grand march of the human race, peculiar to themselves, in marking the progress of mankind in arts, commerce, and civilization; and they embellish history with its richest pages of learning, and impress on the mind of the scholar and the student the profoundest lessons of the rise and fall of nations. They have formed in all ages the great centers of industrial and intellectual life, from which mighty outgrowths of civilization have expanded. In short, they are the mightiest works of man. And whether we view them wrapped in the flames of the conqueror, and surrounded with millions of earnest hearts, yielding in despair to the wreck of fortune and life at the fading away of expiring glory, or the sinking of a nation into oblivion; or whether we contemplate them in the full vigor of prosperity, with steeples piercing the very heavens, with royal palaces, gilded halls, and rich displays of wealth and learning, they are ever wonderful objects of man's creation, ever impressing with profoundest conviction lessons of human greatness and human glory. In their greatness they have been able to wrestle with all human time. We have only to go with Volney through the Ruins of Empire; to trace the climbing path of man, from his first appearance on the fields of history to the present day, by the evidences we find along his pathway in the ruins of the great cities, the creation of his own hands. The lessons of magnitude and durability which great cities teach may be more clearly realized in the following eloquent passage from a lecture of Louis Kossuth, delivered in New York City: "How wonderful! What a present and what a future yet! Future? Then let me stop at this mysterious word, the veil of unrevealed eternity. "The shadow of that dark word passed across my mind, and, amid the bustle of this gigantic bee-hive, there I stood with meditation alone. "And the spirit of the immovable past rose before my eyes, unfolding the picture-rolls of vanished greatness, and of the fragility of human things. |
