52 New Yoek at the "World's Columbian Exposition. 



Hollanders, is to-day the very kernel of the commercial metropolis of the 

 Union. The center of population in New York city has moved far up 

 the island, and the splendid emporiums of its local trade are invading 

 districts, where, in the memory of men still living, the sportsman went to 

 seek for quail and woodcock. But for the metropolitan district — the 

 greater New York — the center alike of population and of commercial 

 activity remains at this hour where that bold Amsterdam skipper, Captain 

 Adrian Block, placed it 279 years ago. 



What the lower end of Manhattan Island is to the 3,000,000 of people 

 living around it, that the State and city of New York are in a certain 

 degree to the people of the United States. With each successive census 

 the center of population of the Union has been shown to have shifted 

 westward along the thirty-ninth parallel from the seventy-sixth to the 

 eighty-fifth degree of longitude. It was eighteen miles west of Baltimore 

 in 1800, and it is found to be twenty miles east of Columbus, Ind., in 1890. 

 But the heart that keeps the life blood of commerce circulating through 

 the veins and arteries of this great republic is where it was when the 

 years of American progress were few, and where it will be when they are 

 counted by centuries. 



New York owes much to the development of the great West, but that 

 development also owes much to New York. When the American colonies 

 were a fringe of sparsely peopled communities stretched along the Atlantic 

 seaboard, there were provinces for which a greater future might have been 

 predicted than for New York, and cities that bade fair to lead in the race 

 for wealth the bustling part on the Hudson. But when the colonies had 

 become self-governing States, and the tide of migration began to pass 

 beyond the mountain barrier and overflow into the valley of the Missis- 

 sippi, the future greatness of New York was assured. For here was a 

 new domain, broad as the continent of the older world, and far more 

 fertile, to which New York supplied both entrance and outlet, and with 

 whose growth in wealth and population its own were bound to grow. 

 Henceforth the rank of New York among American Commonwealths was 

 as little doubtful as that of the parent seat of its trade among American 

 cities. 



New York was formed by nature to bn the Empire State of the Union. 

 The ocean tides that sweep from the Atlantic into the noblest of American 

 harbors are felt deep in the heart of the State. The sea has cleft the 

 backbone of the continent for a path for the commerce of New York, and 

 the level sweep of the western prairies broadens out from the valley of 

 the Mohawk. In war and in peace our State has held the gateway of • the 

 continent. It was so when the red man owned the soil, and when the 



