Excerpt from The Quaker Soldier, or the British in Philadelphia: An Historical Novel

After London and Paris, Philadelphia contests, with our other great American city, the third rank in Christendom. More than half a million inhabitants vast domestic commerce - still vaster handicraft and manufacturing industry - material resources not rivaled on this Continent, if anywhere - well entitle Philadel phia to feel herself one of the great cities of the world. Yet a short three quarters of a century ago she was a provincial town of under forty thousand inhabitants. This unparalleled growth has occurred in the lifetime of many of us, under our very eyes, and does not astonish us as if it were a fact of history, seen through the vista of distance.

Philadelphia is but one of many great cities which. Have kept even pace until a civic cluster has grown up, the like nowhere else seen now, nor ever, except in the Magna Graecia of Ancient Italy. Where else - in what single nation of modern times - do we find four such cities as Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, in such close proximity? France has her Paris, but where are her three other cities comparable to ours? Austria has her Vienna, but what else? Even England has no second city to contest the palm with the second of our glorious galaxy.

The rise of our great cities is but one chapter. A lifetime ago reaches beyond the birth of the Great Republic. Within that brief period - that single point on the surface of history - a great power has grown up, indisputably of the first class among the nations of the earth. Men have witnessed great em pires formed gradually, like Rome and Russia, or rapidly, like Alexander's, Genghis Khan's, and Na poleon's, but they were the gathering under one government of nations already in being, without any real increase of resources, and often with a loss. Ours is a new creation, not a mere concentration, ours is a new power, created out of the raw material of national greatness. Where else does a single lifetime cover similar grand results?

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