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.
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