nary business-generation. In 1826, the personal
estate of New York City, so far as could be arrived at for official
purposes, amounted to $42,434,981. In 1863, the estimate of this class
of property-values was $192,000,161. It had thus more than quadrupled in
a generation.

But statistics are most eloquent through illustration. Let us look
discursively about the city of New York at various periods of her career
since the opening of the present century. I shall assume that a map of
the city is everywhere attainable, and that the reader has a general
acquaintance with the physical and political geography of the United
States.

Not far from the beginning of the century, Wall Street, as its name
implies, was the northern boundary of the city of New York. The present
north boundary of civilized settlement is almost identical with the
statutory limit of the city, or that of the island itself. There is no
perceptible break, though there are gradations of compactness, in the
settled district between the foot of the island and Central Park. Beyond
the Park, Haarlem Lane, Manhattanville, and Carmansville take up the
thread of civic population, and carry it, among metropolitan houses and
lamp-posts, quite to the butment of High Bridge. It has been seriously
proposed to legislate for the annexation of a portion of Westchester to
the bills of mortality, and this measure cannot fail to be demanded by
the next generation; but for the present we will consider High Bridge as
the north end of the city. Let us compare the boundary remembered by our
veterans with that to which metropolitan settlement has been pushed by
them and their children. In the lifetime of our oldest business-men, the
advance wave of civic refinement, convenience, luxury, and population
has travelled a distance greater than that from the Westminster Palaces
to the hulks at the Isle of Dogs. When we consider that the population
of the American Metropolis lives better, on the average, than that of
any earthly capital, and that ninety-nine hundredths of all our
suffering poor are the overflow of Great Britain's pauperism running
into our grand channels a little faster than we can direct its current
to the best advantage,--under these circumstances the advance made by
New York in less than a century toward the position of the world's
metropolis is a more important one than has been gained by London
between the time of Julius Caesar and the present century.

I know an