Repoet of Boabd of General Managees. 113 



founded and empires developed. There learning and the arts flourished 

 and humanity had both opportunity and ambition for the highest intel- 

 lectual development. 



The " Half Moon," upon which Hendrik Hudson stood as she entered 

 our harbor, was a Dutch ship with an English captain and a crew of many 

 nationalities. She fitly typified the hospitable and cosmopolitan character 

 of the future metropolis and the coming Empire State. She represented 

 that genius of commerce whose handmaidens are civil and religious liberty. 

 The witches of New England fleeing from the hangman and the scaffold 

 found ■« elcome and shelter in tolerant and liberal Nlw York. The same 

 spirit continued down the years, brought the Yankee over to dispossess the 

 Dutchman from political power and the Irishman to dethrone the Yankee, 

 and the German, the Scandinavian, the Italian, the Frenchman, the Rus- 

 sian, the Dane and the Spaniard to enjoy the equal benefits and the 

 unequaled opportunities of the great city and State of New York. 



This cosmopolitan town, while it is the first of American cities, yet has 

 more Irish than any city in Ireland, more Germans than any city in Ger- 

 many save Berlin, and enough Italians to equal the population of the 

 second class cities of Italy. We should fail properly to celebrate the day 

 if we did not pay tribute to those emigrants from Holland who founded 

 the State and left upon it the indelible impress of their spirit and princi- 

 ples. It has been the misfortune of the early Dutch settlers that the 

 genius of Irving ran riot in a humorous history of their habits, occupa- 

 tions and achievements. 



I have said that great leaders and thinkers have always builded better 

 than they knew. There is one exception — the fathers of the American 

 republic. The works of Washington and Jefferson, of the Adamses and 

 Hamilton, of Jay and of Madison show that, notwithstanding the dis- 

 couragements of their surroundings and the narrow basis upon which they 

 were organizing their republic, they anticipated without dreaming of the 

 results which would follow steam and electricity, a nation possessing the 

 powers, the population and the attributes which belong to the United 

 States of to-day. Ot those constructive statesmen there was one of such 

 marvelous, such precocious, such commanding genius that he stands easily 

 at the head of the intellectual giants of his own age, with hardly a peer 

 in any age. The impress of Alexander Hamilton is upon our Federal 

 Constitution, in our judicial system, and pervades the whole of our fiscal 

 policy, He fitly represented and with consummate and commanding 

 ability the spirit of New York. She never has been narrow, never sec- 

 tional and never has put her State fiag and State interests in advance 

 of the interests of the republic. She has always believed and acted upon 

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