14 
a warm day, tliat of shortness. Being thus instructed as to time, I 
trust I shall be excused if T do not as fully develop as could be wish- 
ed the several propositions which I intend to present in connection 
with the interesting occasion on which we are assembled. The first 
of these propositions is that modern civilization tends to congregate 
the population of countries into large cities, that cities tend to increase 
more rapidly than the general population. These efl'ects may be 
referred to two causes, first, the education of the working classes, and 
secondly, to the i7itroduction 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, al'ter 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 employrnent. 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 apphcable 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 iu 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 Gidf 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 witli the tendencies as to the future, should 
