ive a
most unqualified denial. No person conversant with many of the large
provincial towns in England and Scotland, can conscientiously "throw a
very large stone" at New York; for though much is doing among us to
improve and sweeten--chiefly, thanks to the scourge of epidemics--I fear
that in too many places we are still on this point "living in glass
houses." Doubtless, New York is infinitely dirtier than London, as
London at present is far less clean than Paris has become under the rule
of the Third Napoleon. I fully admit that it is not so clean as it
should be, considering that the sum nominally spent on cleansing the
streets amounts to very nearly sixty thousand pounds a year, a sum equal
to one pound for every ten inhabitants; but the solution of this problem
must be looked for in the system of election to the corporation offices,
on which topic I propose to make a few observations in some future
portion of these pages. While on the subject of streets, I cannot help
remarking that it always struck me as very curious that so intelligent a
people as the Americans never adopted the simple plan of using sweeping
carts, which many of their countrymen must have seen working in London.
If not thoroughly efficient, their ingenuity might have made them so;
and, at all events, they effect a great saving of human labour. But
there is a nuisance in the streets of New York, especially in the lower
and business part of the town, which must be palpable to every
visitor--I mean the obstructions on the pavement; and that, be it
observed, in spite of laws passed for the prevention thereof, but
rendered nugatory from maladministration. In many places, you will see a
man occupying the whole pavement opposite his store with leviathan boxes
and bales, for apparently an indefinite period, inasmuch as I have seen
the same things occupying the same place day after day, and forcing
every passer-by off the pavement. This information may console some of
our own communities who are labouring under the gnawing and painful
disease of a similar corrupt and inefficient administration.

Amid the variety of shops, the stranger cannot fail to be struck with
the wonderful number of oyster-saloons stuck down on the basement, and
daguerreotypists perched in the sky-line: their name is legion;
everybody eats oysters, and everybody seems to take everybody else's
portrait. To such an extent is this mania for delineating the 'human
face divine' carried, t