than
could be excited by any conclave of excellent men with one idea,
meeting, however, solemnly, to feed it with legislative pap.

While no man can ride into metropolitan success on a hobby-horse,
popular dissent will still take no stronger form than a quiet withdrawal
and the permission to rock by himself. No amount of eccentricity
surprises a New-Yorker, or makes him uncourteous. It is difficult to
attract even a crowd of boys on Broadway by an odd figure, face, manner,
or costume. This has the result of making New York an asylum for all who
love their neighbor as themselves, but would a little rather not have
him looking through the key-hole. In New York I share no dreadful
secrets with the man next door. I am not in his power any more than if I
lived in Philadelphia,--nor so much, for he might get somebody to spy me
there. There is no other place but New York where my next-door neighbor
never feels the slightest hesitation about cutting me dead, because he
knows that on such conditions rests that broad individual liberty which
is the glory of the citizen.

In fine, if we seek the capital of well-paid labor,--the capital of
broad congenialities and infinite resources,--the capital of most widely
diffused comfort, luxury, and taste,--the capital which to the eye of
the plain businessman deserves to be the nation's senate-seat,--the
capital which, as the man of forecast sees, must eventually be the
world's Bourse and market-place,--in any case we turn and find our quest
in the city of New York.

To-day, she might claim Jersey City, Hoboken, Brooklyn, and all the
settled districts facing the island shore, with as good a grace as
London includes her multitudinous districts on both sides of the Thames.
Were all the population who live by her, and legitimately belong to her,
now united with her, as some day they must be by absorption, New York
would now contain more than 1,300,000 people. For this union New York
need make no effort. The higher organization always controls and
incorporates the lower.

The release of New York commerce from the last shackles of the Southern
"long-paper" system, combined with the progressive restoration of its
moral freedom from the dungeon of Southern political despotism, has
left, for the first time since she was born, our metropolitan giantess
unhampered. Let us throw away the poor results of our last decade! New
York thought she was growing then; but the future has a stature for her