t of the St. George's Society, Mr. Fowler, mentioned a
curious circumstance connected with the history of New York. He said
that he remembered the city when it contained only fifty thousand
inhabitants, and not one paved side walk, excepting in Dock Street. Now
it had a population of nearly 400,000, and had so changed, that he could
no longer identify the localities of his youthful days.

Who, he asked, had done this? The emigrant! and it was protection they
needed, not charity. He should have added, that the great mass of the
emigrants who have made New York the mighty city it now is, were Irish,
and that the native Americans have banded themselves in another form of
protection against their increasing influence.

The republican notions which the greater portion of the lower classes
emigrating from the old country have been drilled into, lead them to
believe that in the United States all men are equal, and that thus they
have a splendid vault to make from poverty to wealth, an easy spring
from a state of dependency to one of vast importance and consideration.
The simple axiom of republicanism, that a ploughman is as good as a
president, or a quarryman as an emperor, is taken firm hold of in any
other sense than the right one. What sensible man ever doubted that we
were all created in the same mould, and after the same image; but is
there a well educated sane mind in America, believing that a perfect
equality in all things, in goods and chattels, in agrarian rights and in
education, is, or ever will be, practicable in this naughty world?

Has nature formed all men with the same capacities, and can they be so
exactly educated that all shall be equally fit to govern?

The converse is true. Nature makes genius, and not genius nature. How
rarely she yields a Shakespeare!--There has been but one Homer, one
Virgil, since the creation. There was never a second Moses, nor have
Solomon's wisdom and glory ever again been attainable.

Look at the rulers of the earth, from the patriarchs to the present day,
how few have been pre-eminent! Even in the earliest periods, when the
age of man reached to ten times its present span, the wonderful sacred
writ records Tubal-Cain, the first artificer, and Jubal, the lyrist, as
most extraordinary men; and with what care are Aholiab and Bezabel,
cunning in all sorts of craft, and Hiram, the artificer of Tyre,
recorded! Hiram, the king, great as he undoubtedly was, was secondary in
Solomon's