fraudulently obstructed in the benignest arrangements she ever made for removing the effete material of a vast city's vital processes. In the matter of climate, New York experiences such comparative freedom from sudden changes as belongs to her position in the midst of large masses of water. She enjoys nearly entire immunity from fogs and damp or chilly winds. Her weather is decided, and her population are liable to no one local and predominant class of disease. So far as her hygienic condition depends upon quantity and quality of food, her communications with the interior give her an exceptional guaranty. Despite the poverty which her lower classes share in kind, though to a much less degree, with those of other commercial capitals, there is no metropolis in the world where the general average of comfort and luxury stands higher through all the social grades. It is further to be recollected that health and the chief comforts of life are correlative, that the squalid family is the unhealthy family, and that, as we import our squalor, so also we import the materials and conditions of our disease. This a priori view is amply sustained by the statistics of our charitable institutions. Alanson S. Jones, whose position as President of the Board of Surgeons attached to the Metropolitan Police Commission combines with his minute culture in the sciences ministering to his profession to make him a first-class authority upon the sanitary statistics of New York, states that the large majority of deaths, and cases of disease, occur in that city among the recent foreign immigrants, and that the same source furnishes the vast proportion of inmates of our hospitals, almshouses, asylums, and other institutions of charity; furthermore, that two thirds of all the deaths in New York City occur among children, - a class to which metropolitan conditions are decidedly unfavorable; and that, while the seven hundred thousand inhabitants of Philadelphia are distributed over an area of one hundred and thirty square miles, the one million inhabitants of New York are in

Dr.

cluded within the limit of thirty-five square miles, yet the excess of proportionate mortality in the latter city by no means corresponds to its density of settlement. It is safe to affirm, that, taking all the elements into calculation, there is no city in the civilized world with an equal population and an equal 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 farreaching 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 greatgrandchildren.

Turning to the second great power of the Old World, we may assert that there is not a harbor on the entire French

to nurse some small tissue of the metropolis; that these are "Hudson River tows"; and that, novel as that phenomenon may appear to him, every other fresh traveller has been equally startled by it since March, and will be startled by it till December. Another ministry to New York is performed by the night-tows, consisting of a few cattle, produce, and passenger barges attached to a steamer, made up semiweekly or tri-weekly at every town of any importance on the Hudson and the Sound. We will not include the large fleet of Sound and River sloops, brigs, and schooners in the list of New York's artificial advantages.

Turning to New York's land communication with the interior, we find the following railroads radiating from the metropolitan centre.

1. A Railroad to Philadelphia.

2. A Railroad to the Pennsylvania Coal Region.
3. A Railroad to Piermont on the Hudson.
4. A Railroad to Bloomfield in New Jersey.

5. A Railroad to Morristown in New Jersey.

6. A Railroad to Hackensack in New Jersey.

7. A Railroad to Buffalo.

8. A Railroad to Albany, running along the Hudson. 9. Another Railroad to Albany, by an interior route. 10. A Railroad to New Haven.

11. A Railroad to the chief eastern port of Long Island.

12. The Delaware and Raritan Road to Philadelphia, connecting with New York by daily transports from pier.

13. The Camden and Amboy Railroad, connecting similarly.

14. The Railroad to Elizabeth, New Jersey.

The chief eastern radius throws out ramifications to the principal cities of New England, thus affording liberal choice of routes to Boston, New Będford, Providence, and Portland, as well as an entrance to New Hampshire and Vermont. To all of these towns, except the more southerly, the Hudson River Road leads as well, connecting besides with railroads in every direction to the northern and western parts of the State, and with the Far West by a number of routes. The main avenue to the Far West is, however, the Atlantic and Great Western Road, with its twelve hundred miles of uniform broad-gauge. Along this line the whole riches of the interior may reasonably be expected to flow eastward as in a trough; for its

position is axial, and its connection perfect. All the chief New Jersey railroads open avenues to the richest mineral region of the Atlantic States, - to the Far South and the Far West of the country. Two or three may be styled commuters' roads, running chiefly for the accommodation of city business-men with suburban residences. The Long Island Road is a road without important branches; but the majority of all the roads subsidiary to New York are avenues to some broad and typical tract of the interior.

Let us turn to consider how New York has provided for the people as well as the goods that enter her precincts by all the ways we have rehearsed. She draws them up Broadway in twenty thousand horse-vehicles per day, on an average, and from that magnificent avenue, crowded for nearly five miles with elegant commercial structures, over two hundred miles more of paved street, in all directions. She lights them at night with eight hundred miles of gas-pipe; she washes them and slakes their thirst from two hundred and ninety-one miles of Croton main; she has constructed for their drainage one hundred and seventy-six miles of sewer. She victimizes them with nearly two thousand licensed hackmen; she licenses twentytwo hundred car- and omnibus-drivers to carry them over twenty-nine different stage-routes and ten horse-railroads, in six hundred and seventy-one omnibuses and nearly as many cars, connecting intimately with every part of the city, and averaging ten up-and-down trips per day. She connects them with the adjoining cities of the main-land and with Staten and Long Island by twenty ferries, running, on the average, one boat each way every ten minutes during the twenty-four hours. She offers for her guests' luxurious accommodation at least a score of hotels, where good living is made as much the subject of high art as in the Hôtel du Louvre, besides minor houses of rest and entertainment, to the number of more than five thousand. She attends to their religion in about four hundred places of public worship.

She gives them breathing-room in a dozen civic parks, the largest of which both Nature and Art destine to be the noblest popular pleasure-ground of the civilized world, as it is the amplest of all save the Bois de Boulogne. Central Park covers an area of 843 acres, and, though only in the fifth year of its existence, already contains twelve miles of beautifully planned and scientifically constructed carriage-road, seven miles of similar bridle-path, four sub-ways for the passage of trade-vehicles across the Park, with an aggregate length of two miles, and twenty-one miles of walk. As an item of city property, Central Park is at present valued at six million dollars; but this, of course, is quite a nominal and unstable valuation. The worth of the Park to New York property in general is altogether beyond calculation.

New York feeds her people with about two million slaughter-animals per an

Averaging the weight of the cattle which came to New York market in 1863 at the moderate estimate of 700 lbs., the metropolitan supply of beef for that year amounted to 189,392,700 lbs. This, at the average price of nine and a quarter cents per pound, was worth $17,518,825. Proportionably with these estimates, the average weekly expenditure by butchers at the New York yards during the year 1863 was $328,865.

It is an astonishing, but indubitable fact, that, while the population of New York has increased sixty-six per cent during the last decade, the consumption of beef has in the same time increased sixty-five per cent. This increment might be ascribed to the great advance of late years in the price of pork,- that traditional main stay of the poor man's housekeeping, — were it not that the importation of swine has increased almost as surprisingly. We are therefore obliged to acknowledge that during a period when the chief growth of our population was due to emigration from the lowest ranks of foreign nationalities, during three years of a devastating war, and inclusive of the great financial crisis of 1857, the increase in consumption of the most costly and healthful article of animal food lacked but one per cent of the increase of the population. These statistics bear eloquent witness to the rapid diffusion of luxury among the New York people.

From the table of classification by States we may draw another interesting inference. It will be seen that by far the largest proportion of the bullocks came into the New York market from the most remote of the Western States contributing. In other words, New York City has so perfected her connection with all the sources of supply, that distance has become an unimportant ele

238,124 bales.

We have no room for the details which would embarrass us, if we should attempt a statement of the cost of clothing the New York people. We will merely remark, in passing, that one of the largest retail stores in the New York dry-goods trade sells at its counters ten million dollars' worth of fabrics per annum, and that another concern in the wholesale branch of the same trade does a yearly business of between thirty and forty millions. As for tailors' shops, New York is their fairy-land,—many eminent examples among them resembling, in cost, size, and elegance, rather a European palace than a republican place of traffic.

The most comprehensive generalization by which we may hope to arrive at an idea of the business of New York is that which includes in tabular form the statistics of the chief institutions which employ and insure property.

On the 24th of September, 1864, sixty-three banks made a quarterly statement of their condition, under the general banking law of the State. These banks are at present the only ones in New York whose condition can be definitely ascertained, and their reported capital amounts to $69,219,763. The national banks will go far toward increasing the total metropolitan banking capital to one hundred millions. The largest of the State banks doing business in the city is the Bank of Commerce, (about being reorganized on the national plan,) with a capital of ten millions; and the smallest possess capital to the amount of two hundred thousand dollars.

Mr. Camp, now at the head of the New York Clearing-House, has been kind enough to furnish the following interesting statistics in regard to the total amount of business transactions managed by the New York banks in connection with the Clearing-House during the two years ending on the 30th of last September. Figures can scarcely be made more eloquent by illustration than they are of themselves. I therefore leave them without other comment than the remark that the weekly ex