Following is the text of the letter from Detroit Mayor William C. Maybury, written Dec. 31, 1900, to be read to the citizens of Detroit in the year 2001.
To his honor, the mayor of Detroit in 2001 and the generation whose privilege and, I trust pleasure, it will be to read the contents of this box: Health and Greeting.
The papers herein contained for the first time brought to light by you after a retirement of one hundred years, prepared at my request by men and women prominent in the activities of Detroit at the close of the nineteenth century.
Our desire is to convey to you across the long span of the century as clear an insight as is possible into the social, religious, moral, commericial and political affairs of Detroit.
It will be to you a testimony from living witnesses of the events which they chronicle and conditions which they describe. From testimony so transmitted you will be better able to discern what advancement you have made from the modest beginnings to which we are witnesses.
We are well aware that the century closing has been marvelous in its achievements and we might be fairly excused for believing that the limit of possibilities has been accomplished in many ways, but on the contrary, we do not so believe, because the past has taught us that what seemed so impossible has been already accomplished and we would therefore not be greatly surprised at greater accomplishments in the future.
We commmunicate by telegraph and telephone over distances that at the opening of the nineteenth century were insurmountable.
We travel at a rate not dreamed of then. The powers of electricity have been applied marvelously, and compressed air and other agencies are undergoing promising experiments.
We travel by railroad and steam power from Detroit to Chicago in less than eight hours, and to New York City by several routes in less than 20 hours.
How much faster are you traveling? How much farther have you annihilated time and space and what agencies are you employing to which we are strangers? We talk by long distance telephone to the remotest cities in our own country, and with a fair degree of practical success.
Are you talking to foreign lands and to the island of the sea by the same method?
And so throughout the various pathways of human progress the papers in this box will bring to you notice acknowledge of present conditions, and possibly words somewhat prophetic of the future.
How correct our prophencies may be we know not, for we write them in doubt and yet in hopefulness. We write them in the fervent belief that you will stand upon a vantage ground of experience, far higher and more resplendent than our own.
We ask, therefore, for those who assume to prophecy, your kindest consideration and even, judgment, especially when we assure you that these prophets are not without honor, eve in ther own country and their own time.
If we may judge from the history of human life and all experience, very few, if any, of the three hundred thousand souls who are now inhabitants of Detroit will exist when you have opened this box which we have so solemnly closed, and yet it may be possible that much which we accept from faith may be to you then knowledge, and possibly that knowledge may come with consciousness that we may be witnesses and even listeners to the voices that will interpret the words we have written.
Begging that you will accept for helpfulness all that tends to your information and good, and look most kindly upon that which may seem at your time to be at fault, I close this tribute.
May we be permitted to express one supreme hope -- that whatever failures the coming century may have have in the progress of things material, you may be conscious when the century is over that, as a nation, people and city, you have grown in righteousness, for it is that exalts a nation.
Respectfully and affectionately submitted,
William C. Maybury, Mayor of Detroit.
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