New York Has Its Literary Aspirations, Its
Commercial Grandeur, And, Heaven Knows, It Has Its Politics Also.
But These Do Not Strike The Visitor As Being Specially
Characteristic Of The City.
That it is pre-eminently American is
its glory or its disgrace, as men of different ways of thinking may
decide upon it.
Free institutions, general education, and the
ascendency of dollars are the words written on every paving-stone
along Fifth Avenue, down Broadway, and up Wall Street. Every man
can vote, and values the privilege. Every man can read, and uses
the privilege. Every man worships the dollar, and is down before
his shrine from morning to night.
As regards voting and reading, no American will be angry with me
for saying so much of him; and no Englishman, whatever may be his
ideas as to the franchise in his own country, will conceive that I
have said aught to the dishonor of an American. But as to that
dollar-worshiping, it will of course seem that I am abusing the New
Yorkers. We all know what a wretchedly wicked thing money is - how
it stands between us and heaven - how it hardens our hearts and
makes vulgar our thoughts! Dives has ever gone to the devil, while
Lazarus has been laid up in heavenly lavender. The hand that
employs itself in compelling gold to enter the service of man has
always been stigmatized as the ravisher of things sacred. The
world is agreed about that, and therefore the New Yorker is in a
bad way. There are very few citizens in any town known to me which
under this dispensation are in a good way, but the New Yorker is in
about the worst way of all. Other men, the world over, worship
regularly at the shrine with matins and vespers, nones and
complines, and whatever other daily services may be known to the
religious houses; but the New Yorker is always on his knees.
That is the amount of the charge which I bring against New York;
and now, having laid on my paint thickly, I shall proceed, like an
unskillful artist, to scrape a great deal of it off again. New
York has been a leading commercial city in the world for not more
than fifty or sixty years. As far as I can learn, its population
at the close of the last century did not exceed 60,000, and ten
years later it had not reached 100,000. In 1860 it had reached
nearly 800,000 in the City of New York itself. To this number must
be added the numbers of Brooklyn, Williamsburg, and Jersey City, in
order that a true conception may be had of the population of this
American metropolis, seeing that those places are as much a part of
New York as Southwark is of London. By this the total will be
swelled to considerably above a million. It will no doubt be
admitted that this growth has been very fast, and that New York may
well be proud of it.
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