tract in twenty-four pages, of _Laws
Concerning the Welfare of Every Citizen of New York_, and the same
Society issues similar abstracts of the laws of other States. They have
a large and well-equipped lecture organisation, and they issue
excellent practical _Suggestions for Conferences and Courses of Study_.
The problem to be grappled with by this Society and others working on
similar lines is no doubt one of immense difficulty. It is nothing less
than the education in citizenship of the most heterogeneous, polyglot,
and in some respects ignorant and degraded population ever assembled in
a single city, since the days of Imperial Rome. The spread of political
enlightenment in New York and other cities cannot possibly be very
rapid; but no effort is being spared to accelerate it. I sometimes
wonder whether the obvious necessity for political education in America
may not, in the long run, prove a marked advantage to her, as compared,
for instance, with England. Dissatisfaction, as I have said above, is
the condition of progress. We are apt to assume that every Briton is
born a good citizen; and in the lethargy begotten of that assumption, it
may very well happen that we let the Americans outstrip us in the march
of enlightenment.

LETTER X

New York in Spring--Central Park--New York not an Ill-governed City--The
United States Post Office--The Express System--Valedictory.

NEW YORK.

It is with a curious sensation of home-coming that I find myself once
more in New York. Spring has arrived before me. The blue dome of sky has
lost its crystalline sparkle, and the trees in Madison-square have put
on a filmy veil of green. Going to a luncheon party in the Riverside
region, I determine, for the sheer pleasure and exhilaration of the
thing, to walk the whole way, up Fifth-avenue and diagonally across
Central Park. What a magnificent pleasure ground, vast, various, and
seductive! A peerless emerald on the finger of Manhattan! If I were not
bound by solemn oaths to present myself at West-End-avenue at half-past
one, I could loaf all the afternoon by the superb expanse of the Croton
Reservoir, looking out over the giant city of sunshine, with the white
dome of Columbia College and the pyramid of Grant's Monument on the
northern horizon, and far to the eastward the low hills of Long Island.

Passing the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I am reminded, not only that I
have never been inside it, but that in all the cities I hav