Cities have always been powers in history. Athens educated Greece, as well as adorned it, while Corinth filled the throbbing and thirsty Hellenic veins with poisoned blood. The weight of Constantinople broke the Roman Empire asunder. The capture of the same magnificent city gave to the Turks their establishment in Europe for the following centuries. Even where they have not had such a commanding pre-eminence of location, the social, political, moral force proceeding from cities has been vigorous in impression, immense in extent. The passion of Paris, for a hundred years, has created or directed the sentiment of France. Berlin is more than the legislative or administrative centre of the German Empire. Even a government as autocratic as that of the Czar, in a country as undeveloped as Russia, has to consult the popular feeling of St. Petersburg or of Moscow.
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 multitudes 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 associated, 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 attitude 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 lustre, 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 accumulated 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.