In many industries Cincinnati leads. The wealth of cities throughout the continent is locked in banks and vaults manufactured in Cincinnati. The cowboys on the plains and the horsemen on city paddocks sit in saddles fashioned in Cincinnati. Cigars by the millions in this country are packed in boxes manufactured in Cincinnati. It produces more schoolbooks than any other city, and is near the head of the list in turning out religious publications.

On the 22d of February, 1794, a canoe left Cincinnati with a federal mailbag consigned to Pittsburg. This marked the beginning of regular service with the East. In early days, a Cincinnati merchant seeking to buy goods in New York consumed sixty days in making the journey to the metropolis. To-day he may lunch in the Queen City, take a train and lunch the following noon in Manhattan. Long before the advent of railways, Cincinnati became a center of travel and distribution. As early as 1801, a full-rigged brig took on a cargo at Cincinnati and set sail for the West Indies. Not long after, and many years before Fulton turned his attention to Western waters, citizens of Cincinnati met at Yeatman's Tavern to consider a "contrivance for transporting boats against the current by the power of steam or elastic vapor," but without tangible results; and, in fact, when the first steamboat did paddle noisily past the city the circumstance was dignified with only a four-line notice in the Cincinnati press.

Before long, however, the steamboat revolutionized river travel, and thenceforth Cincinnati leaped by bounds from a village to a great city, and every recurrent trip of these harbingers of vast commerce seemed to find a new suburb springing into bustling life on the Cincinnati uplands.

[CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, CINCINNATI.]

The fact that this city was originally included and still remains in the New Orleans customs district shows its accessibility to ocean traffic. Its superiority in water communication is shown by a computation made by the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce regarding the relative cost of transporting freight from points of origin to all parts of the United States. The comparisons per 100 pounds are as follows: From Cincinnati, 81 cents; Chicago, 84 cents; St. Louis, 88 cents; Minneapolis, $1.22. A similar computation applicable to a radius of 600 miles from the point of origin gives the following averages per 100 pounds: From Cincinnati, 66 cents; Chicago, 73 cents; St. Louis, 75 cents; Minneapolis, $1.11.

While growing into greatness, Cincinnati did not forget, in the critical times of the Civil War, its honorable history as the former outpost of the Republic. Its trade was largely with the South, but sternly its citizens decided that arguments in favor of trade interests smacked of treason, and with stoic heroism closed the city to rebellion. And when Lew Wallace, fortifying Cincinnati to anticipate attack, called for volunteers, the whole community responded, and from the Ohio valleys came the sharp-shooting "squirrel hunters" in procession seemingly endless to defend the city.

[SUSPENSION BRIDGE.]

Since then the growth of Cincinnati has been in keeping with the development of the nation. It does not hope, as Harriet Martineau suggested during her visit here, ever to become the home of the country's capital, but it rejoices in being the great city nearest the American centre of population. Its library of a quarter of a million volumes and its Historical Society cherish the splendid stories of its past and the accumulating data of its current achievements. Its artists and citizens delight in dignifying that record in bronze and marble in the environing parks and city squares.

The visitor to Cincinnati, on a clear afternoon, should take passage on an incline road, rise to the heights of Eden Park, and traversing that high plateau, whose natural beauty and landscape gardening earn for it its name, find his way to the water tower. An elevator lifts him five hundred feet to the observatory platform, where with field-glasses he may behold the splendid panorama of Cincinnati. Far below, spanning the river over which "a crazy craft with sails and paddles" once ferried the people, he sees five massive structures of steel and stone, including the famous suspension bridge, begun in the early part of the Civil War, and by its completion during the stress of that conflict testifying eloquently to the faith of its citizens that strife was not to sever the nation, and that these mammoth girders of steel would constitute an important tie in the inevitable reunion of North and South. It was of this structure that James Parton wrote in 1867, that the whole population of Cincinnati might get upon it without danger of being let down into the water. The five superb bridges in their capacity and security afford marked contrast to the earlier attempts to span the river which floods swept away, including the arched structure which went down in the torrent of 1832, accompanied on its seaward flight by a tumbling Methodist church which the roaring Muskingum had added to the universal baptism.

Not all of the life that now courses through Cincinnati's streets could crowd upon its bridges, for the people of the cities and villages across on the Kentucky shore belong in every commercial and social sense to Cincinnati, and swell its population to the half-million mark. In fact, within a radius which the vision from this tower almost sweeps, there are a dozen ambitious and wealthy Ohio cities, founded by the sturdy men of the Revolution who went forth from Cincinnati and still tributary to the parent town.