LOCAL NECROLOGY, 1888-Continued.

Next year THE BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE will be half a hundred years old. The semi-centennial point marks a long space of time in the New World, however short it may seem in the broad intervals of the older continent. Looking back ten decades from 1890 the observer gathers a vast harvest of historical events in the Nation and the State. Nowhere has latter day growth been more remarkable than within the EAGLE'S especial constituency. In 1810 the population of Brooklyn was 36,333. Now it is close upon 800,000, if indeed it has not quite attained that total. When the first number of the EAGLE was published, Brooklyn had taken only its experimental, uncertain steps as a city. Everything which contributes to the upbuilding of a great community has been since secured-not numbers merely, but public improvements, commercial enterprise and the wealth which is its product, institutions of learning, art and letters and other evidences of cultivation, organized charities and churches, and back of these instrumentalities, animating and sustaining them, a strong, quickly responsive, trustworthy public opinion. Impelled by all these influences Brooklyn during the half century has advanced from the modest and meagre villagehood in which it hesitated to take a municipal charter to a place in the front rank of the modern centres and forces of civilization. It has kept abreast of the stirring life of to-day without losing anything of that traditional home quality for which the town has been everywhere famous. All this development the EAGLE has seen, and of it has been in no small measure a part. It has reported the daily progress of Brooklyn as that of no other place in the United States has been recorded. It has not only taken constant account of affairs on their face large and important, such as the building of the Bridge, the provision of rapid transit, the establishment of Prospect Park, the introduction of the Ridgewood water, the laying down of

surface railroads, the substitution of gas for oil lamps, the expansion of a feeble constabulary to a strong police department, the formation of a thoroughly equipped body of firemen, and many more of the essential conditions of comfortable city life. These things are now so much matters of course that those to whom they are so familiar as to be seldom thought of could hardly believe that every one of them was once opposed as hotly as if it were a scheme of deadly injury to the town. Yet it would be easy to prove the fact from the EAGLE'S files. It is speaking entirely within bounds to say that the EAGLE, by making public the beginnings of these movements, by iterating and reiterating the considerations in their support, by untiring direction of popular attention to them, by helping to mould public opinion in regard to them, has aided in no trifling degree to bring all these undertakings to a prosperous conclusion. But this is not all.

Enterprises so magnificent as the Bridge or the Park speak to an extent for themselves. They compel notice and are sure, in a certain sense, to be cared for by the people. But there is a multitude of minor interests of the city which in the aggregate are of the highest moment. Often they are dull, dry and unattractive. It is not always easy to interest men in the construction of a sewer, in making the roadbed of a street, in the analysis of the figures of a contract, in the selection of inconspicuous officers. Yet upon these and kindred things may turn the success or failure of municipal government. It is the simple truth that these apparently tedious details as well as large and impressive results have been watched by the EAGLE as they have been by no newspaper in any other great city. Pointing to the EAGLE'S course in this respect people are accustomed to say confidently that nowhere else in the world is there such a local press as the press of Brooklyn. It is not pretended that this course is determined by mere unselfish philanthropy. It is part of a deliberate business policy, the wisdom of which is demonstrated by the unfailing experience that,

whenever and in proportion as Brooklyn has grown and gained, the EAGLE has grown and gained. So it happens that as the EAGLE sends out the fourth number of its latest outgrowth, the BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE ALMANAC, it is able to say that its own latest twelvemonth is by far the most profitable pecuniarily and in every respect the most successful of all its forty-eight years. As it approaches the fiftieth it would be ungrateful for it to change its attitude as a journal toward the city with whose fortunate affairs its own substantial interests are so closely involved. But it is not necessary to invoke the sentiment of gratitude. Plain business instinct guarantees that the EAGLE will continue to be in the future, as it has been in the past, pre-eminently the Brooklyn newspaper.

The increasing pressure in recent years upon the EAGLE's business and mechanical resources has admonished it of the near necessity of removing from its lower Fulton street quarters. While it there owns and occupies buildings covering nearly a city block of ground, still more space is needed. To provide this the property at the corner of Washington and Johnson streets, opposite the new Federal building, comprising the Brooklyn Theatre and Clarendon Hotel, has been purchased, and when the site becomes available by the expiration of leases, the structures now standing upon it will be removed to give place to an EAGLE building architecturally unequalled by any other in the town, where, with accommodations of the most ample sort, the paper will continue to serve the City and its interests.

In order to accommodate the public the EAGLE has established commodious branch offices at 44 Broadway, E. D., 1227 Bedford avenue, and 435 Fifth avenue, where all business pertaining to the main establishment is transacted.