It Is The Third
Biggest City In The Known World, For Those Chinese Congregations Of
Unwinged Ants Are Not Cities In The Known World.
In no other city
is there a population so mixed and cosmopolitan in their modes of
life.
And yet in no other city that I have seen are there such
strong and ever visible characteristics of the social and political
bearings of the nation to which it belongs. New York appears to me
as infinitely more American than Boston, Chicago, or Washington.
It has no peculiar attribute of its own, as have those three
cities - Boston in its literature and accomplished intelligence,
Chicago in its internal trade, and Washington in its Congressional
and State politics. 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.
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