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more rapidly than the general population. These effects may be 

 referred to two causes, first, the education of the working classes, and 

 secondly, to the introduction of labor-saving machines. These causes 

 are notably illustrated in New England, where the masses are more 

 highly educated than in any other part of the world. No sooner does 

 the young New-Englander approach manhood, after having enjoyed 

 the benefits of a common school education, than he abandons the plow 

 and the spade and hurries to the city or the manufacturing village to 

 obtain more intellectual and less toilsome employment. The vacuum 

 which is thus produced is, however, more than filled by the invention, 

 it may be by the same individual, of patent machines actuated by 

 steam or horse-power, which will do, in many cases, a hundred fold 

 more work in a given time than the man himself could accomplish. 

 Another proposition to which I would call your attention is that cities 

 in proportion to their extent and rapidity of growth engender habits 

 of thought and of action of a character the reverse of progress, and 

 which, if unrestrained, would tend to disintegrate society and resolve 

 it into its primitive barbarous elements; that these principles are 

 eminently applicable in New York, which, including the whole popu- 

 lation at the mouth of the Hudson, is now a vast city, and is destined 

 to become, I say it without hesitation, the largest city in the world; 

 no other city having so large a country tributary to it in the richest 

 productions of the soil and mine, and no other city so favorably situ- 

 ated in regard to geography and topography to secure these tributaries 

 perpetually to itself. There are in fact but two outlets for water 

 communication from the immense region of the basin of the Mississippi, 

 namely, that along the river itself into the Gulf of Mexico near New- 

 Orleans and that along the great lakes and the Hudson, terminating 

 at New-York in the Atlantic Ocean. 



It is therefore of the first importance that those who possess the 

 intelligence, the influence, and the power, who from the experience of 

 the past are impressed with the tendencies as to the future, should 

 endeavor to provide all the means possible to avert evils similar to 

 those with which this city has been afflicted, and which tend to afflict 

 it in a still greater degree in the future. 



Among these means I would of course place in the first rank a 

 liberal support of the Christian minister and the Christian missionary, 

 but the labors of these may be greatly aided by whatever tends to 

 neutralize the intensified selfishness engendered by the struggle in a 



