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Two-hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Benjamin Franklin
Twohundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Benjamin Franklin Author:Massachusetts Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: REMARKS OF HIS HONOR, JOHN FRANCIS FITZGERALD It will be my pleasure upon my return to City Hall to send a cable to the new President of the French Republic,... more » expressing the hearty good wishes of the six hundred thousand citizens of Boston for an administration of happiness, prosperity, and progress. My honored predecessor in his happy introduction has asked me to explain wherein Boston is bigger and better to-day than she was in the time of Franklin. I do not think those of you who have eyes and ears will entertain any doubt as to her tangible growth. The Boston that Franklin knew was planted on three low hills which gave its first name to the peninsula. Dorchester and South Boston were dotted with farms; Cambridge and Charlestown were aspiring villages; a thin strip of land united the town proper with Roxbury; and along this neck, as it was called, three stages a week ran out of the capital of New England, which counted in all some twelve thousand souls. Contrast this picture with the interminable stretch of streets and houses, the glittering panorama visible from Great Blue Hill in early winter evenings, the trains running north, south, and west almost every minute of the day, the nightly exodus to the suburbs and the swinging back and forth all day long of the million persons, more or less, who now ply their occupations within our boundaries. There is no doubt Boston is bigger and busier. I believe, also, that she is better, though not so good as she might be and will be, if we all give a little of our strength and enthusiasm towards making her so. Her laws are now framed by free citizens and not by a foreign parliament, owing allegiance to an imbecile king. Her children are well taught, herpoor relieved, her sick healed. The blind, the dumb, the crippled, the aged, t...« less