the scene of laying the corner-stone of the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road from Baltimore made the processional display more imposing, led by the First Baltimore Hussars.
The venerable guest of the day was Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. After the invocation and the reading of the Declaration of Independence, John B. Morris, a director of the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road, addressed the assembled throng. His words were singularly prophetic. "We are about opening the channel," he said, "through which the commerce of the mighty country beyond the Alleghany [Mountains] must seek the ocean—we are about affording facilities of intercourse between the east and west, which will bind the one more closely to the other, beyond the power of an increased population or sectional differences to disunite. We are in fact commencing a new era in our history; . . It is but a few years since the introduction of steam boats effected powerful changes, and made those neighbors, who were before far distant from each other. Of a similar
