journeying to and fro within the limits of the city. There is no other city in which the movement of the population seems so incessant ; perhaps none where, cheap as the fares are, the sum paid is so great in proportion to number. The gross receipts of the elevated roads only have been $48,502,420.86; in round numbers 10,000,000l. The stock of the Manhattan Company is at 166, the par being 100. enormous Now I beg the Presidents of the Metropolitan and District Railways to note one fact. On all the elevated railways of New York city there is for all distances a uniform fare of five cents, which is the American equivalent of twopence-halfpenny. For this sum the New Yorker may travel from the extreme southern to the extreme northern limit of his city. The rule is the same on all surface cars and in all omnibuses, and there can be no doubt that this simplicity of finance is one cause of the traffic. No complicated scheme of varying fares to perplex the passenger; no wrangles with conductors; no disputes at booking offices; no abstruse calculations of competing tariffs as between different lines; no hesitation whether to stop at this corner or that. The New Yorker gets in where he pleases, gets off where he pleases, and the only problem that can possibly present itself to his mind is whether he has or has not the nickel,' as he calls it, which is equally good for his fare from one block to another, or from the Battery to Harlem. Perhaps these distinguished Presidents might note another fact. The working staff of the elevated roads is but a fraction of the number employed on the underground. A clerk in the A clerk in the ticket-office, a man to see that passengers drop their tickets into a glass box as they arrive on the platform, a third on the platform itself, whose function seemed to be to answer the questions of European or country cousins,-that is all the visible human apparatus. There is a conductor at each end of each car, who throws open the collapsing iron gates for egress and ingress when the trains come in. No army of door-slamming porters; no examination of tickets, no inspectors, no rushing about of guards. Here, as in every American contrivance, economy of labor is carried as far as it can be carried. I am far from expecting that Sir Edward Watkin, or Mr. Forbes, should consent to the Americanization of their roads, even for the sake of better dividends and a higher quotation of the stock. The simplification of the system depends possibly to some extent on the abolition of classes, and classes are unknown on these New York lines, where the millionaire banker and the bank-porter, who is seldom a millionaire, may be seen sitting side by side in the same car; neither of them the worse for this democratic proximity. I do not know which of the two would be the more surprised by a suggestion that either was out of his place. The Englishman who meditates, as I believe most Englishmen do, a journey next year to what they oddly call " The States," may be relieved to know that the cab service in New York is improved. The cabs are better and the fares are less. I do not wish to generalize too broadly from an experience not very long, but I think it may also be said that the cabmen are more civil. An English friend who has of late seen New York oftener than I have, gave me before I went an alarming account of the matter. It does not signify, said he, "what you give; you must give more than the fare, and you are sure to be insulted besides. Perhaps they are more tender to their fellow-country men than to the Briton, whose frequent mistake is to forget that the idea of equality is rooted deep in the American breast, and still deeper in the breast of the immigrant who landed day before yesterday. But I may testify that in none of my dealings with the drivers of vehicles plying for hire was I insulted. I did not hear a rough word from any one of them, and there was no dispute about fares. I found I could now "ride”— which is not only good American but good English-any reasonable distance. in a hansom for half-a-dollar, or two shillings. The cabs are well horsed, well turned out, clean, and not badly driven. The four-wheeler of London can claim no real relationship with his kin beyond the sea; nor his driver. The New York four-wheeler is a smart brougham, superior in every respect to the brougham let out for hire by a London job-master. If taken at a railway station, the fare will never be less than four shillings, but neither will it be more, and there is no charge for luggage. The tariff for day or evening work is four shillings an hour. That remarkable product of free institutions known as the "hack," with two horses, has not disappeared. It has lately been of service in conveying to jail some of the aldermen who corruptly chartered a railroad on Broadway to compete with it. The hack is, however, being elbowed slowly and surely off the streets; not by street cars, but by better and cheaper vehicles. New York, it must be added, has not, and never will have, a cab service so general as that of London. A hansom is not to be found at every corner, nor is one needed. Nine times out of ten, the car or the stage takes people where they wish to go, and everybody uses the cars and stages, ladies included. Let an English visitor take the new Fifth Avenue line, and as he passes on he will see the doors of palaces open, and mother and daughter -matre pulchra filia pulchrior-trip down the steps and get into the stage. And he will be the only person who will think it remarkable that they should do So. Business of certain kinds has followed the movement up-town. The lower part of Fifth Avenue had long been a favorite site for shops and stores. The invasion has been pushed till the middle portion is now pretty equally divided between stores and private houses. Fashion now ordains that her votaries shall live at one of the extremes: at the very bottom, beginning with the scene of Mr. Henry James's vivid study of local color, Washington Square; or above Thirty-Fifth Street. Fashion is not cmnipotent even in New York, and many of the best houses and best people remain outside her jurisdiction and disregard her edicts. Nor can she say that any single district owns her sway. She can protect none of the precincts she would fain call her own. A huge grocery store has taken possession of the very corner of the Fifth Avenue which lies opposite to the entrance to Central Park. Two of the finest hotels in New York, or in the world, are on the Avenue, between Fortieth and Fiftieth Streets. New York has no such lawgiver among her landowners as the Duke of Westminster, to determine what sort of building shall or shall not be erected in a given territory. The Astors? Yes, but the landed possessions of the Astors are scattered, and that powerful family is not powerful enough to prevent stores from being opened in the immediate neighborhood of its own residences. Nor do the New Yorkers care as much about this mixture of stores and houses as people seem to in London. The sacred seclusion of Grosvenor Square or Park Lane is not so much their model as the Avenue des Champs-Elysées in Paris-the finest street in Europe, with some of the finest houses, and by the side of them, or even on the ground floor, the warehouses of carriage-makers, restaurants, and I know not what else. The changes down-town are perhaps more remarkable still. Pre-eminently a commercial city, New York has created a building type of her own for commercial purposes. When it became evident that Wall Street must remain the financial centre and financial exchange, not of New York only but of all America, the bankers and brokers looked about them in despair. Where were they to find, on this narrow strip of land, room enough for banks and offices within the rigidly limited district whence alone the Stock Exchange and great moneyed institutions of the city are instantly accessible? But one day some architect of brains bethought himself of the legal maxim, cujus est solum ejus est usque ad cælum, and began to build toward the skies. No doubt there were old-fashioned people who shook their heads, and asked who was going to do business in sixth-story offices? But whoso mounts to-day to the upper floors of the best buildings in New York may look down, far down, on the roofs of these six-story structures. Nine or ten floors are the rule. This fashion had begun more than ten years ago, but ten years ago it was an experiment; to-day New York, from the City Hall downward to the Battery, is crowded with these lofty structures. One of the first was the Tribune building, which, since I last saw it, has more than doubled its size, and has perhaps the finest architectural exterior of them all. The largest of all is the Mills Building, with a double front of red brick, on Broad and Wall Streets. The reputed cost of this single edifice is three millions of dollars. The Mutual Life Insurance Building in Nassau Street is another of the show structures which the stranger has to admire. They are finished and furnished with a splendor which I have no space to describe in detail; one of them, with staircases and corridors wainscoted in panelled walnut and cherry; the other in white marble. This lavishness has become a matter of course, and luxury now goes to the making of money as well as to the spending of it. What makes it possible to build to such a height is the system of elevators or lifts, one of the rare instances in which the American uses a longer word than the English. The American elevator, however, is very unlike the English lift. The London machine climbs heavenward as slowly as an unrepentant sinner; the New York elevator shoots upward so swiftly and smoothly that it is easy to see why the lofty upper floors are preferred to the lower. There are six elevators in the Mills Building ceaselessly ascending and descending; four, I think, in the Mutual Life, two on each side of the hall, where stands a liveried porter, silently motioning to right and left the stream of entering visitors. From any of the upper floors to the rear, enchanting views of the East River and of Brooklyn are to be had; less complete, however, than those from the Tribune, or from Mr. Cyrus Field's building at the lower end of Broadway, which he has modestly named after Washington instead of himself, as the fashion runs. I know nothing to equal the landscape which lies beneath and about the spectator who is privileged to place himself at the best windows of this edifice. The blue waters part or meet under his eyes; North River and East River flow together past him as he looks straight down on them, sparkling in such sunlight as you only pray for in England, blue with the azure of the Mediterranean, buoyant with commerce, foreign and domestic. The loveliness of the harbor is never so alluring as when it is seen on intimate terms, and here the gazer is so near that he might plunge into it. The city lies at his back; Brooklyn is to the left, with her heights and her broad lowlands of warehouses; Governor's Island is in the central foreground; the guarded and fortressed Narrows far to the south; Staten Island lifting its long slopes on the right; the majesty of the Hudson, with its measureless tide, dividing him from the New Jersey shores. These last he will think are considerably less majestic, unless perchance the Pennsylvania Railroad station or the ferryhouses strike him as remarkable for a dignity which the most enthusiastic American scarcely discovers in them. But he may look beyond them to the purple summits of the Orange Mountains which indent the far horizon. ་་ The substance of these buildings is equal to the show, or more than equal. They have a mediæval solidity and thickness of wall, and are in fact, as well as in name, fireproof. They seem built for immortality. Mr. Lowell told us the other day, at Harvard, that not one of our older buildings in America is venerable, or will ever become So. Time refuses to console them. They all look as though they meant business and nothing more." There can be no question that these newer ones of New York mean business, and he might be a rash man who should predict that they, any more than the more ancient structures to which Mr. Lowell refuses to do homage, will ever become venerable. They are part of the machinery of money-making. Mr. Ruskin is reported to have said that he would like to pull down the New Town in Edinburgh and rebuild it, and pull down New York and not rebuild it. If he were called upon to excuse this outburst, he would be able to urge with truth that he had never seen the city he would so cheerfully annihilate. Should he see these more recent efforts toward a right architecture, he might not approve them; he would at least admit that we do not, as he complained in respect of the newer portions of London, model our ginshops after the Doge's Palace at Venice. There are few signs in New York of that purely imitative purpose which has presided over the later efforts of Lon don and provincial architects. Gothic, Lombardo-Venetian, Queen Anne, and the more whimsical creations in red brick with drawbridges and posterngates which diversify the dulness of the West End, have never become the vogue in New York. They are styles which might not survive the voyage across the Atlantic. I do not mean to deny that we are imitative, but we have gone elsewhere for models. The Tribune building would never have been what it is had there been no Palazzo Vecchio at Florence, nor Mr. Vanderbilt's house what it is if Mr. Richard Hunt's imagination had not been kindled by loving study of some of the historic châteaux of France. Mr. Richardson's great pile at Albany certainly owes something to the authors of the French Renaissance. This really fine structure has not cost less than four millions sterling-all that for the Capitol of a single one of the thirty-nine States of the Union. There is a legend-the movement is so rapid that the story of last year becomes the legend of this that so long ago as the days of our Civil War there was a New Yorker fainthearted enough to believe in the triumph of the Rebellion and the ultimate formation of a Northern confederacy. But he was capable of looking ahead, though not around him, and he laid the foundations of this edifice at Albany broad enough to support a National Capitol. His idea was that when Congress came northward, New York State should be able to offer it a home, and that Albany would thus become the chief city of a divided Union. That dream is dispelled forever, but the vision of the dreamer has taken shape and substance in stone, and New York gets her legislation done in marble halls that are, to say the least, a monument of the architect's genius. The impartial critic-I am neither a critic nor impartial-might, for aught I know, say of New York that, with all its magnificence, it wants ensemble Go where he may in the business parts of the city, he will find buildings to admire, but the number of streets which are altogether admirable is limited. There may be moments in his stroll when he wishes that some beneficent tyrant of an edile, like Haussmann, had had the ordering of the whole business. He might as well wish the lesser Napoleon had set up his Third Empire in Manhattan. New York as it stands is an expression of the American spirit, of its force, its individuality, its inventiveness, its courage, and also its impatience of control. Precedent, which counts for so much in England, counts for little with us outside of the courts of law. Mr. Ruskin long since proclaimed that never can there be a sixth order of architecture-that no man is capable of inventing one. The American listened to the edict, and said he guessed he would try. He would be the last person to say he has succeeded, but he will point out, and not without pride, some of his experiments toward novelty. Where he has borrowed, he has adapted. Where he has given the reins to his fancy, he has produced something which is at least an illustration of his favorite doctrine of freedom from servitude to European traditions. He certainly never would have submitted to be Haussmannized, and well for him it is that he would not, for his Haussmann might have been named Tweed and his municipal guidance have found its source in Tammany Hall. All A dozen nationalities have wrought, each after its own soul, and all sorts of influences have left their mark on the streets of New York-not to say its pavements also. But the spirit of independence when expressed in brick and mortar is only too apt to become a spirit of lawlessness. The New Yorker is not devoid of respect for regularity, but he thought he had paid it a sufficient tribute when he had distributed his island, or all the upper part of it, into rectangular parallelograms duly numbered in arithmetical sequence. these great buildings which I have mentioned are the work either of single men or of corporations, subject to no other restriction, so far as I know, than those imposed for sanitary reasons, or for security. Certainly there is no authority in New York which presumes to ordain that every new building on a corner should be rounded off at its extremity in order not to obstruct the vision of the approaching cab-driver. The truncated edifices which have become common in London may console us in New York for the want of a Metropolitan Board of Works-anything is better than a monotonous mistake all over the city. We have mistakes, but we have variety. Some day we shall perceive that a street in which magnificent buildings occur is not necessarily a magnificent street. An idea of harmony, of symmetry, of friendly relations between buildings that are neighbors, will in due time make its way. We shall make our toilet. We shall very soon put underground those telegraph wires which Lord Brassey truly described as unsightly. I even think it possible that something may be done to reduce the number of the gilt signs which vulgarize Broadway. A proportion far greater than formerly bear names which are certainly not American, and are very often those of the German Hebrew. There are so many of them to each separate front, each advertiser striving to surpass his rival, that they only confuse the customer or client, and cease to be a guide to him. It is idle to spend money on architecture if the sign-maker is to cover it all up. We are a practical people, and the practical objections to some of our present methods will by and by insure a reform. Whether sooner or later, matters but little to a city with the future before it which New York has. The future will take care of itself, and the present is splendid enough to dispense with panegyric. A photograph is all the panegyric the New Yorker need desire for the metropolis of which he is so justly proud. Yet I thought him almost too familiar with his own town to do full justice to those qualities which are most characteristic. To me, its growth during ten years seemed the work of fifty. There is much to speak of besides the purely material side of New York life. But I may assure my English reader that he must see New York for himself if he cares to get an adequate impression of its brilliancy, its animation, its energy, its immense activ ities, and, amid all the cosmopolitan confusions so often described, its profoundly American character. II. ON CERTAIN MOVEMENTS IN OPIN- Yes, profoundly American in char- acter. been the fashion, to speak of New York as a cosmopolitan city. There is a sense in which the adjective is accurate enough, but most of the facts on which this attempt to denationalize the chief city of America is based seem to me superficial and not essential. It is, we are told, the first Irish and the third German city in the world--has a larger Irish population than Dublin, and a larger German than any German city but Berlin and Vienna. As to the German contingent, the most striking fact of all is the existence of a newspaper printed in German, with a circulation of 40,000 copies daily-an able, prosperous, powerful journal. That supplies a better measure of the Teutonic element in New York than any number of lager-beer shops, or even than the ever-recurring German signs in the Bowery and in Broadway. The presence of the Irish has made itself felt in a different way. The Irish have, I think, no daily paper; they prefer to edit ours. If they do not edit them, they swarm on the various editorial staffs of the New York press. They are clever and versatile, and their cleverness is in nothing more plainly seen than in the bent they often give to what passes for American opinion. Whenever an Irish question is uppermost in England--and when is it not? the cable supplies the English public with what is here supposed to be an expression of American opinion on these Irish matters. The American himself distinguishes readily enough between the American accent and the Irish brogue. But how should the readers of English journals detect the difference? It does not always exist. There are journals in New York which speak with no foreign tongue. They may have. aliens on their staffs, but the deciding voice is of the soil. I could name, nevertheless, a New York paper which reckons among its editors the correspondent of an important journal in London. He, naturally enough, gives a large space in his telegrams to the opinions of his own sheet, though one of small circulation; but I do not know that he has yet found time to mention the fact that its editor-in-chief is an Irishman. The Irish are, in fact, acquiring on the New York press a position which may by and by become al 1 |