the
community from the cost of maintaining them in case they became paupers,
or pay for each of them the sum of two dollars and a half. The payment of
money has been preferred, and this has put into the hands of the
Commissioners a liberal revenue, faithfully applied to the advantage of
the emigrants.

Mr. Havemeyer was chosen President of the Board, but resigned the office
after a few months, and was succeeded in it by Mr. Verplanck, who held it
till the day of his death. Under the management of the Commissioners, the
Bureau of Emigration, becoming with almost every year more perfectly
adapted to its purpose, has grown to vast dimensions, till it is now like
one of the departments of government in a great empire. Whoever passes by
Ward's Island, where the tides of the East River and the Sound meet and
rush swiftly to and fro through their narrow channels, will have some idea
of what the Board has done as he sees the domes and spires of that great
cluster of buildings, forming a vast caravanserai in which the poorer
class of emigrants are temporarily lodged, before they can be sent into
the interior or find employment here. Here are barracks for the men, a
spacious building for the women and children, a nursery for children of a
tender age, Catholic and Protestant chapels, a dispensary, workshops, a
lunatic asylum, fever wards, surgical wards, storehouses, residences of
the physicians and other persons employed in the care of the place, and
out-houses and offices of various kinds. Here, too, rise the stately
turrets of the spacious new hospital styled the Verplanck Emigrant
Hospital, in honor of the great philanthropist, for such his constant and
noiseless labors in this department of charity entitle him to be called.

The Commissioners found that they could not protect the emigrants from
imposition without a special landing place from which they could wholly
exclude the rascal crew who cheated them. It took eight years to obtain
this from the New York Legislature, but at last, in 1855, it was granted,
and the old fort at the foot of Manhattan Island, called Castle Garden,
was leased for this purpose. This is now the Emigrants' Landing, the gate
of the New World for those who, pressing westward, throng into it from the
Old. Night and day it is open, and through this passage the vast tide of
stranger population, which is to mingle with and swell our own, rushes
like the current of the Bosphorus from the Black Sea toward