ic and Great Western continuation to St. Louis.
This uniform broad-gauge of twelve hundred miles, which has just been
opened by the energy and talents of Messrs. McHenry and Kennard,
apparently decides the main channel by which the West is to discharge
her riches into New York.--But we are trenching on the subject the
capital's artificial advantages.

Finally, New York has been prevented only by disgraceful civic
mismanagement from becoming long ago the healthiest city in the world.
In spite of jobbed contracts for street-cleaning, and various corrupt
tamperings with the city water-front, by which the currents are
obstructed, and injury is done the sewage as well as the channels of the
harbor, New York is now undoubtedly a healthier city than any other
approaching it in size. Its natural sanitary advantages must be evident.
The crying need of a great city is good drainage. To effect this for New
York, the civil engineer has no struggle with his material. He need only
avail himself dexterously of the original contour of his ground.
Manhattan Island is a low outcrop of gneiss and mica-schist, sloping
from an irregular, but practically continuous crest, to the Hudson and
East Rivers, with a nearly uniform southerly incline from its
precipitous north face on the Haarlem and Spuyten Duyvil to high-water
mark at the foot of Whitehall Street. Its natural system of drainage
might be roughly illustrated by radii drawn to the circumference of a
very eccentric ellipse from its northern focus. Wherever the waste of
the entire island may descend, it is met by a seaward tide twice in the
twenty-four hours. On the East River side the velocity of this tide in
the narrow passages is rather that of a mill-stream than of the entrance
to a sound. Though less apparent, owing to its area, the tide and
current of the Hudson are practically as irresistible. The two branches
of the city-sewage, uniting at the Battery, are deflected a little to
the westward by Governor's Island, and thus thrown out into the middle
of the bay, where they receive the full force of the tidal impulse,
retarded by the Narrows only long enough to disengage and drop their
finer silt on the flats between Robin's Reef and the Jersey shore. The
depurating process of the New World's grandest community lies ready for
use in this natural drainage-system. If there be a standing pool, a
festering ditch, a choked gutter, a malarious sink within the scope of
the city bills of mo