Daily Evening News - 1883-10-02

Year
1883
Month
10
Day
2
Article Title
The Procession
Author
<Anonymous>
Page Number
n/a
Article Type
Language
Article Contents
The great event of to-day in the two cities has, of course, been the procession. We congratulate all concerned on the impressive demonstration made. It will live long in the recollection of the youngest assisting at it. It told a noble and touching story of difficulties bravely battled with of obstacles triumphantly surmounted, and of high and honorable progress made in innumerable departments of activity. The procession was something to be proud of as well as to remember. It interested an immense number of spectators, and constituted a magnificent spectacle, full of the most stirring suggestions. The brave men and fair woman who reached our shores a hundred years ago had no dream of such a spectacle as being even possible a hundred years from the date of their landing. Indeed, the wisest men of that day, not far distant in the life of a nation, had no conception whatever of the marvels that would be wrought a century hence. It really startles one even now to think of what has been done. Iron steam-driven vessels cross the ocean at the rate of nearly four hundred miles per twenty-four hours. Long trains carry hundreds of passengers over iron rails at the rate sixty miles per hour. Men communicate with each other through the medium of a small copper wire passing under oceans thousands of miles wide. We can learn to-day of things that happened yesterday at the Cape of Good Hope, in the waters of China, in the great cities of India, at leading points in Australia, and along the Pacific coast of America, Men can actually send their voices to each other almost instantaneously between points hundreds of miles distant, and they can make night bright as day by electric agency. And then what is to be said of the doings of machinery, whose powers are still rapidly developing. Truly, if the city founders could revisit the glimpses of the moon, what astonishment would be theirs at the wonders that would meet their eyes! How will it be a hundred years hence? Who can say? The wildest dreams of the visionary scientist may be more than realised. We shall not live to see the fulfilment, but the work will go on steadily year by year, and the changes of even the next twenty-five years may prove as great and as beneficial as those of the past quarter of a century.