WILL NEW YORK BE THE FINAL WORLD METROPOLIS? 
be like trying to escape death itself. I was 
one day standing in the woods upon a flat 
stone, in what at certain seasons was the bed 
of a stream, when one of these weasels came 
undulating along and ran under the stone 
upon which I was standing. As I remained 
motionless, he thrust out his wedge-shaped 
head and turned it back above the stone as if 
half in mind to seize my foot; then he drew 
back, and presently went his way. ‘These 
weasels often hunt in packs like the British 
stoat. When I was a boy, my father one day 
WILL NEW YORK BE THE FINAL WORLD METROPOLIS? 
As a mathematical and mechanical prod- 
igy, the great Roebling Bridge, connecting 
Brooklyn with New York, is eclipsed by its 
philosophic aspect, as a vital artery, and a 
bond of more strength than cables and 
trussed beams of steel. It is a nerve of con- 
scious identity between the two sides of the 
double city, not only as,the eye follows the 
ceaseless thrill of movement and the imagina- 
tion is grasped by the expressive continuity, 
but especially as the crossing populations 
grow habituated to the indivisible expanse of 
city beneath and around on every'side, within 
which the glimpses of a boundary river show 
like partial seams in an almost seamless 
whole. With this imposing specimen of the 
spontaneous evolution and integration of a 
great metropolis before every eye, it may be 
hoped that a somewhat novel treatment of 
the great New York question, on general and 
vital principles, may meet with thoughtful ap- 
preciation. The statistical evidences might 
have been revised to a later date; but the 
totals, and the illustrative effect for which they 
are used, would still have been, to all intents 
and purposes, the same. 
The metropolis is the chief organ through 
which both expression and effect are given to 
the genius and character of a nation. It is 
the brain, from which the’nerves of public in- 
telligence and impulse’ spread to every ex- 
tremity, and to which the minor centers and 
ganglia are unconsciously subsidiary. It is 
the heart, whose pulsations gather and redis- 
tribute the vital currency from and to the 
remotest veinlets. It is the alimentary center 
where the national wealth is digested, mobil- 
ized, and infused into the circulation to nour- 
ish every fiber of the system. There can no 
more/e two such vital systems and centers 
in a’nation than in an individual. No such 
lusus nature was ever long preserved. As 
687 
armed me with an old musket and sent me 
to shoot chipmunks around the corn. While 
watching the squirrels, a troop of weasels 
tried to cross a bar-way where I sat, and were 
so bent on doing it that I fired at them, boy- 
like, simply to thwart their purpose. One of 
the weasels was disabled by my shot, but the 
troop was not discouraged, and, aiter making 
several feints to cross, one of them seized 
the wounded one and bore it over, and the 
pack disappeared in the wall on the other 
side. 
in the individual, so in the whole, the single- 
ness of such organs is the unity of the being, 
and their size and vigor are the measure of its 
vitality and power. rd 
History is little more than the history of 
capital cities. “Paris is #rance.” Blot out 
from English annals all that was originated or 
consummated in London, and what have you 
left? Rome was the’ ultimate focus of vital 
force in the ancieht world. No people ever 
successfully orgahized and maintained itself 
with a plurality of capitals. A second capital 
rent the Roman empire in twain. Babylon 
culminated on the ruins of Nineveh. 
In out own young country, the organism 
is not/yet perfectly defined. More than one 
quasi metropolis aspires to be the vital center. 
Arguments have been constructed from plau- 
sible data in favor of each of these expectant 
capitals. Dubjous opinion in most minds, 
perhaps, halting between such arguments, has 
questioned whether any one city were destined 
to metropolitan supremacy in America. But, 
despite the force of rival pretensions, our 
glimpse of, national physiology instructs us 
that there must be one and only one center 
of the continental nationality tested and con- 
solidated by thé.war for the Union. Assum- 
ing, as a first principle in political philosophy, 
that national being is organic and analogous 
to the individual organism,— inevitably de- 
veloping, if not developed from, one central 
sensorium,—it follows that every local move- 
ment from partial causes, however powerful, 
must merge at length in a common vortex 
of national force and motion,a metropolis 
commensurate with the future of the Ameri- 
can republic. The greater the complexity of 
genius and the exuberance of vitality exhib- 
ited in so many Titanic rivals, all so unlike, 
the more majestic, simply, the center to which 
they must all prove tributary at last. The sys- 
