addition, the infinite patience and unwearied courage by which great results are achieved. It demanded the endurance of heat, and cold, and physical distress. Its constructors have had to face death in its most repulsive form. Death, indeed, was the fate of its great projector, and dread disease the heritage of the greater engineer who has brought it to completion. The faith of the saint and the courage of the hero have been combined in the conception, the design and the execution of this work.

Let us, then, record the names of the engineers and foremen who have thus made humanity itself their debtor for a successful achievement, not the result of accident or of chance, but the fruit of design, and of the consecration of all personal interest to the public weal. They are: John A. Roebling, who conceived the project and formulated the plan of the Bridge; Washington A. Roebling, who, inheriting his father's genius, and more than his father's knowledge and skill, has directed the execution of this great work from its inception to its completion; aided in the several departments by Charles C. Martin, Francis Collingwood, William H. Paine, George W. McNulty, Wilhelm Hildenbrand and Samuel R. Probasco as assistant engineers; and as foremen by E.F. Farrington, Arthur V. Abbott, William Van der Bosch, Charles Young and Harry Tupple, who, in apparently subordinate positions, have shown themselves peculiarly fitted to command, because they have known how to serve. But the record would not be complete without reference to the unnamed men by whose unflinching courage, in the depths of the caissons, and upon the suspended wires, the work was carried on amid storms, and accidents, and dangers, sufficient to appall the stoutest heart. To them we can only render the tribute which history accords to those who fight as privates in the battles of freedom, with all the more devotion and patriotism because their names will never be known by the world whose benefactors they are. One name, however, which may find no place in the official records, cannot be passed over here in silence. In ancient times when great works were constructed, a goddess was chosen, to whose tender care they were dedicated. Thus the ruins of the Acropolis to-day recall the name of Pallas Athene to an admiring world. In the Middle Ages, the blessing of some saint was invoked to protect from the rude attacks of the barbarians, and the destructive hand of time, the building erected by man's devotion to the worship of God. So, with this Bridge will ever be coupled the thought of one, through the subtle alembic of whose brain, and by whose facile fingers, communication was maintained between the directing power of its construction, and the obedient agencies of its execution. It is thus an everlasting monument to the self-sacrificing devotion of woman, and of her capacity for that higher education from which she has been too long debarred. The name of Mrs. Emily Warren Roebling will thus be inseparably associated with all that is admirable in human nature, and with all that is wonderful in the constructive world of art.

This tribute to the engineers, however, would not be deserved, if there is to be found any evidence of deception on their part in the origin of the work, or any complicity with fraud in its execution and completion. It is this consideration which induced me to accept the unexpected invitation of the trustees to speak for the city of New York on the present occasion. When they thus honored me, they did not know that John A. Roebling addressed to me the letter in which he first suggested (and, so far as I am aware, he was the first engineer to suggest), the feasibility of a bridge between the two cities, so constructed as to preserve unimpaired the freedom of navigation. This letter, dated June 19, 1857, I caused to be printed in the New York Journal of Commerce, where it attracted great attention because it came from an engineer who had already demonstrated, by successfully building suspension bridges over the Schuylkill, the Ohio and the Niagara rivers, that he spoke with the voice of experience and authority. This letter was the first step towards the construction of the work, which, however, came about in a manner different from his expectations, and was finally completed on a plan more extensive than he had ventured to describe. It has been charged that the original estimates of cost have been far exceeded by the actual outlay. If this were true, the words of praise which I have uttered for the engineers, who designed and executed this work, ought rather to have been a sentence of censure and condemnation. Hence, the invitation which came to me unsought, seemed rather to be an appeal from the grave for such vindication as it was within my power to make, and which could not come with equal force from any other quarter.

Engineers are of two kinds: the creative and the constructive. The power to conceive great works demands imagination and faith. The creative engineer, like the poet, is born, not made. If to the power to conceive, is added the ability to execute, then have we one of those rare geniuses who not only give a decided impulse to civilization, but add new glory to humanity. Such men were Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Watt, Wedgwood, Brunel, Stephenson and Bessemer; and such a man was John A. Roebling. It was his striking peculiarity, that while his conceptions were bold and original, his execution was always exact, and within the limits of cost which he assigned to the work of his brain. He had made bridges a study, and had declared in favor of the suspension principle for heavy traffic, when the greatest living authorities had condemned it as costly and unsafe. When he undertook to build a suspension bridge for railway use, he did so in the face of the deliberate judgment of the profession, that success would be impossible. Stephenson had condemned the suspension principle and approved the tubular girder for railway traffic. But it was the Nemesis of his fate, that when he came out to approve the location of the great tubular bridge at Montreal, he should pass over the Niagara River in a railway train, on a suspension bridge, which he had declared to be an impracticable undertaking.

When Roebling suggested the Bridge over the East River, his ideas were limited to the demands of the time, and controlled by the necessity for a profitable investment. He had no expectation that the two cities would embark in the enterprise. Indeed, in one of his letters so late as April 14, 1860, he says, "As to the corporations of New York and Brooklyn undertaking the job, no such hope may be entertained in our time." In eight years thereafter, these cities had undertaken the task upon a scale of expense far exceeding his original ideas of a structure, to be built exclusively by private capital for the sake of profit.

How came this miracle to pass? The war of the rebellion occurred, delaying for a time the further consideration of Roebling's ideas. This war accustomed the nation to expenditures on a scale of which it had no previous conception. It did more than expend large sums of money. Officials became corrupt and organized themselves for plunder. In the city of New York, especially, the government fell into the hands of a band of thieves, who engaged in a series of great and beneficial public works, not for the good they might do, but for the opportunity which they would afford to rob the public treasury. They erected court-houses and armories; they opened roads, boulevards and parks; and they organized two of the grandest devices for transportation which the genius of man has ever conceived; a rapid transit railway for New York, and a great