s the Propontis
and the Hellespont, to help fill the great basin of the Mediterranean.
What will be the condition of mankind when the populations of the two
hemispheres, the East and the West, shall have found, as they must, a
common level, and when the human race, now struggling for room in its
ancient abodes, shall look in vain for some unoccupied region where a
virgin soil is waiting to reward the laborer with bread?

As he enters Castle Garden the emigrant undergoes inspection by a
competent physician, and if he be aged, sick, or in any way disabled, the
master of the vessel must give a special bond for his maintenance. He is
introduced into the building--here he finds one department in which he is
duly registered, another from which he receives such information as a
stranger requires, another from which his luggage is dispatched to its
destination, another at which attend clerks, skilled in the languages of
continental Europe, to write his letters, another at which railway tickets
are procured without danger of extortion, another at which fair
arrangements are made with boarding houses, another from which, if sick or
destitute, he is sent to Ward's Island, and half a dozen others, important
as helps to one who has no knowledge of the usages of the country to which
he has come. I refer to these arrangements, among a multitude of others,
in order to show what administrative talent and what constant attention
were necessary to ensure the regular and punctual working of so vast a
system. To this duty Mr. Verplanck, aided by able and disinterested
associates like himself, gave the labors of a third of a century,
uncompensated save by the consciousness of doing good. The composition of
this Board has just been changed by the Legislature of the State, in such
a manner as unfortunately to introduce party influences, from which,
during all the time of Mr. Verplanck's connection with it, it had been
kept wholly free.

Yet Mr. Verplanck had his party attachments, though he never suffered them
to lead him out of the way he had marked for himself. He would accompany a
party, but never follow it. His party record is singular enough. He was
educated a federalist, but early in life found himself acting against the
federal party. He was with the whigs in supporting General Harrison for
the Presidency, and claimed the credit of suggesting his nomination. Mr.
Clay he would never support on account of his protectionist principles,
an