Excerpt from Saint Louis: The Future Great City of the World I also remember that I am in the city of St. Louis destined, ere long, to be the greatest city on the continent (renewed cheers); the greatest central point between the East and the West, at once destined to be the entrepot and depot of all the internal commerce of the greatest and most prosperous country the world has ever seen; connected soon with India by the Pacific, and receiving the goods of China and Japan; draining, with its immense rivers centering here, the great Northwest, and Opening into the Gulf through the great river of this nation, the Father of Waters the Mississippi. Whenever and that time is not far distant - the internal commerce shall exceed our foreign commerce, then shall St. Louis take the very first rank among the cities of the nation. And that time, my friends, is much sooner than any one of us at the present time actually realizes. Suppose that it had been told to you any one of you here present, of middle age - within twenty years past, that Within that time 80011 a city should grow up here, with such a population as covers the teeming prairies of Illinois and Indiana, between this and the Ohio, who would have realized the prediction? And so the next quarter of a century shall See a larger population west of the Mississippi than the last quarter of a century saw east of the Mississippi; and the city of St. Louis, from its central location, and through the vigor, the energy, the industry, and the enterprise of its inhabitants, shall become the very first city of the United States of America, now and hereafter destined to be the great republican nation of the world - [extract from a speech delivered in St Louis, October 13, 1866, by gen. B. F. Butler. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.