The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-10-27
The Future Capital of the Ame-
rican Union.
From the London Pail MAI Gazette.


lied world from Rome to Byzantium. Historians
have expatated with more than usual of roman |
tic description on the unrivalled site and other |
advantages of the new metropolis, and on tue |
circumstances of the empire which rendered the |
change advisable, If not indispensable. New |
Rome succeeded old Rome amidst the applause |
of whole generation, except the citizens of the
deserted CITY themselves, and the wealth of the |
world was layishad ia order to render it fitting
centre from Whence he world should be gov
erned. But no abid,rg treaty can be made, says
Schiller, with the powers of destiny. The
transfer of dominion was the signal of its over
throw. Only forty-seYen years after Constantine
had founded his seat of government the over
grown realm burst asunder and Constantne's
descendants, in the words of Gibbon, executed
at Naissus ''the solemn and final division of the
Roman empire"
History has to record, in later times one
more change of the capital of q first-rate
States it is that performed by Peter the Great
when he removed the residence of the Car, a
hundred and fifty years ago, from Moscow to st.
Petersburg And the change was success
full one; nor has any evil omen respecting it as
yet had its accomplishment. Nevertheless, there
are signs abroad which seem to indicate that the
great achievement of the great man will one day
be reversed, and the Government retransferred
to its ancient seat at Moscow. The site of st.
Petersburg is open to many serious objec-
tions these were counterbaanced, at the time of
its foundation and for century afterwards, by
the inestimable advantage of direct maritime
communication with the rest of the world but
since the spread of railway communication that
advantage has lost great part of its Importance
and the ancient inland city, seated amidst its
fertile plains, peOpled by the flower of the Mus
cevite nation, has attractions which the situation
of the city OF marsh and ice no louger counter
balances.
These considerations are suggested naturally
enough, by the speculatons of which the Ameri-
can newspapers are now full respecting the
probable removal of the seat of the Federal
Government from Washington. There are many
difficulties in the way of the scheme; but our
n wonderful
into effect by sudden and simultaneous effort
what they have set their hearts upon. The
legendary citizen of Chicago who went to sleep
in prairie and woke up with hotel over his
head, may be n type of the great Republic her.
self, established almost without warning in
some new and fourishing location. 1t is, how
ever, far more likely that the event will be for
some time retarded not so much by practical
impediments as by the rival claims of other
places eager to appropriate SO enormous
windfall.
Washington itself-now threatened with aban-
donment-was, as we all know, invested at
second hand, in defiance of superstition with
something of the classical prestige attaching to
the Eternal City. 1t was said that small col
lection of houses the site had been casually
called Rome. Names of other localities were
adapted on purpose. The Capitol arose
.Where tribunes rule, where dusky Dav bow,
And what was Goose creek once is Tiber now,"
as Tom Moore sang in his anti-Republican days.
That the choice of its site was mistake is now
pretty generally alleged. But it is after all
rather rash to affirm this of an expedient which
has now served its purpose for seventy years, in
a country subject to so much change as the
United States. 1t was certainly well placed as
sort of city of compromise between North and
South, until the great West came in to alter
definitely the balance of power. Its advantages
rs a seat of trade turned out inferior to
what was expected; but its founders did not in
tend it for city OF commerce. Its neighbor-
hood is no doubt melancholy now, since the old
planting interest, the only shadow of European
aristocracy which existed in the country, has
seen its long decay completed by recent events
and Arlington House, once the residence of
Washington himself, overlooking the city from
its grand site across the Potomac, has been
turned into the centre of an enormous cemetery
of the soldier-victims OF the civil war.
But there is great natural beauty
in the endless forest glades around
Washington, and in the long ravine which the
noisy Potomac has cleft for itself through trans
verse ridges of rock even down to the suburbs
of the place. 1t is, no doubt, very i'll laid out;
its choice sites were granted out to spectators
in building, regardless of convenience and uni
formity; and its exaggerated scale interferes
sadly with capabilities for paving lighting, and
draining. AS to the complaint so commonly
urged of its unhealthiness, we are inclined to
believe them very much exaggerated. Ameri-
cans take them very much on trust from mem
bers of Congress, and of the huge tall which
accompanies them-people, who go there un-
willingly, and join the fashionable cry against
the 'overgrown village" which they visit on
compulsion. Europeans very seldom do
to the diplomatic corps, habitually and in all
parts of the world the most accomplished grum-
blers among mankind. Lord Palmerston used
to say that until he became Foreign Minister,
and had to read the correspondence of her Ma
jestys Ministers and Consuls abroad, he had not
formed the least conception of two things-the
variety of disease to which the human frame is
liable, and the expense of living in any part OF
the world. At all events-regarding the matter
from sanitary point of view only-t is difficult
for a foreigner to understand why Washington
should be one of the most ineligible residences
Y in the States while Baltimore only two hours
distant, and placed under very similar circum-
stances of site and climate, should pass Tor one
of the most eligible.
All these. however, are minor considerations
the verdict must go against Washington on the
main issue. Its situation is not central enough
even for present circumstances still less for the
probable future circumstances of the great re
public. Its abandonment and the selection of 4
substitute form only a question of time. AnC
the first problem which has to be settled il
whether one maxim of the traditional wisdom
of the founders and fosterers of American lib
erty is now to be set aside They were strongly
governed by the consideration that the seat of
government, still more that of legislature
should be removed from the corrupting and in
timidating influence of great cities. This wa
notoriously one of the reasons for the selection
of Washington. The same argument (togethe
with that from centrality of site) prevailed il
the of many State capitals: the small rustic
city Gin those days. of Albany superseded New
York as metropolis of the State Harrisburg wa
preferred to Philadelphia by Pennsylvania
Columbus to Cincinnati by Ohio. One of the latest
instances of this kind of selection took place il
our own dominion of Canada, when on thI
union of the two provinces the scattered back
woods village of Ottawa was taken for the capi
tai, in defiance OF the competition of half