l sanitary
rank.

Hydrographically speaking, either Liverpool or Bristol surpasses London
in its claims to be the British metropolis. But as England's chief
commerce flows from the eastward, to accommodate it she must select for
her metropolis the shores of the most accessible, capacious, and
sheltered water on that side of the island. The result is London,--a
city backed by an almost imperceptible fraction of the vast interior
which pays tribute to New York,--having a harbor of far less
capacity than New York, and without any of its far-reaching
ramifications,--provided with a totally inadequate drainage-system,
operating by a river which New-Yorkers would shudder to accept for the
purposes of a single ward,--and supporting a population of three million
souls upon her brokerage in managing the world's commerce. New York has
every physical advantage over her in site, together with an agricultural
constituency of which she can never dream, and every opportunity for
eventually surpassing her as a depot of domestic manufactures. London
can never add arable acres to her suite, while only the destruction of
the American people can prevent us from building ten up-country mills to
every one which manufactures for her market. She has merely the start of
us in time; she has advanced rapidly during the last fifty years, but
New York has even more rapidly diminished the gap. No wonder that
British capitalists will sacrifice much to see us perish,--for it is
pleasanter to receive than to pay balance of exchange, even in the
persons of one's prospective great-grandchildren.

Turning to the second great power of the Old World, we may assert that
there is not a harbor on the entire French coast of capacity or
convenience proportionate to the demands of a national emporium. Though
the site of Paris was chosen by a nation in no sense commercial, and the
constitutional prejudices of the people are of that semi-barbarous kind
which affect at the same time pleasure and a contempt of the enterprises
which pay for it, there has been a decided anxiety among the foremost
Frenchmen since the time of Colbert to see France occupying an
influential position among the national fortune-hunters of the world.
Napoleon III. shares this solicitude to an extent which his uncle's
hatred of England would never permit him to confess, though he felt it
deeply. The millions which the present Emperor has spent on Cherbourg
afford a mere titillation to his am