in the poorer streets. There is a German newspaper too; and two or three German theatres, which the Germans have tried unsuccessfully to obtain leave to open on the Sunday. Indeed, the dulness of New York on Sunday is so pre-eminently British, that it is hard to persuade oneself one is not in London or Glasgow.

The physiognomy of the population is not English ; but it is very difficult to state why, or in what respect, it is not so. The difference I take to be chiefly, that instead of the twenty varieties of form and feature you observe in an English crowd, one English type of face, and one only, the sallow, sharp-featured, straighthaired one, is reproduced indefinitely. An American friend of mine, who, I must add, is a firm follower of Mr. Buckle, has a theory, that the Red Indian is the type of face created by Nature for America; and that there is an irresistible tendency in each succeeding generation of Americans to approximate more and more to the natural Red Indian type. I give no opinion as to the value of the theory; but it is certainly a curious fact, how, in spite of the constant infusion of fresh foreign blood, one uniform type of face appears to be spreading itself through the American people. The coloured population in New York is not numerous enough in the streets, to give a foreign air to the crowd, as it forms little over one per cent. of the whole. At the hotels, and in wealthy private houses, the servants are frequently black, but in the streets

there are few negroes visible. Here, as elsewhere, they form a race apart, never walking in company with white persons, except as servants.

There is a popular delusion in England, that New York is a sort of gingerbread-and-gilt city; and that, contrasted with an English town, there is a want of solidity about the whole place, materially as well as morally. On the contrary, I was never in a town where externally, at any rate, show was so much sacrificed to solid comfort. The ferries, the cars, the street railroads, and the houses, are all so arranged as to give one substantial comfort, without external decoration. It is, indeed, indoors that the charm of New York is found. There is not much of luxury, in the French sense of the word—no lavish display of mirrors, and clocks, and pictures-but there is more comfort, more English luxury, about the private dwelling-houses than I ever saw in the same class of houses at home. The rooms are so light and lofty; the passages are so well warmed; the doors slide backwards in their grooves, so easily and yet so tightly; the chairs are so luxurious; the beds are so elastic, and the linen so clean, and, let me add, the living so excellent, that I would never wish for better quarters, or for a more hospitable welcome, than I have found in many private houses of New York. All the domestic arrangements (to use a fine word for gas, hot water, and other comforts) are wonderfully perfect. Everything, even more than

in England, seems adapted for a home life. From the severity of the winters, there can be no outdoor amusements during a great portion of the year; but, under any circumstances, there appears to be not much of public life. There are no cafés; and the nearest approach to any places of public resort, the hotel bar-rooms, are not places where you can sit down, or find any amusement, as an habitué, except that of drinking.

Undoubtedly, out of doors, you see evidences of a public equality, or rather absence of inequality, among all classes, which cannot fail to strike an inhabitant of the Old World. In the streets, the man in the hat and broadcloth coat and the man in corduroys and fustian jacket never get out of each other's way or expect the other to make way for him. In the cars and omnibuses ladies and washerwomen, gentlemen and labourers, sit hustled together without the slightest mutual sense of incongruity. In the shops and from the servants it is your own fault if you are not treated with perfect civility-but with civility as to an equal, not as to a superior. In the bar-rooms there is no distinction of customers; and as long as you pay your way, and behave quietly, you are welcome whatever your dress may be. No doubt the cause of this general equality is the absence of the classes brutalized by poverty whom you see in all our great cities. There is a great deal of poverty in New York, and the Five Points

quarter-the Seven Dials of the city-is, especially on a bitter winter's day, as miserable a haunt of vice and misery as it was ever my lot to witness in Europe. Still, compared with the size of New York, this quarter is a very small one; and poverty there, bad as it is, is not helpless poverty. The fleeting population of the Five Points is composed of the lowest and most shiftless of the recent foreign emigrants; and in the course of a few years they, or at any rate their children, move to other quarters, and become prosperous and respectable. From these causes, and from the almost universal diffusion of education, there is no class exactly analogous to our English idea of the mob. The fact that well-nigh everybody you meet is comfortably dressed seems to disprove the existence of those dangerous classes which always attract the notice of a foreigner in England. There are few beggars about the town, and of those few, all are children. For an Anglo-Saxon population, there is very little drunkenness visible in the streets; and with regard to other forms of public vice it is not for an Englishman to speak severely. The Broadway saloons, with their so-called "pretty waiter-girls," and the Lager Bier haunts in the low quarters of the town, whose windows are crowded with wretched halfdressed, or undressed women, formed, indeed, about the most shameless exhibition of public vice I have ever come across, even in England or Holland; and I am glad to say that, since I left New York, the

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State Government, under a republican as opposed to a democratic legislature, has taken means to suppress these social nuisances. But in the streets at night, there are few of the scenes which habitually disgrace our own metropolis.

The great quiet and order of the city are in themselves remarkable. There is an air of unsecured security about New York I never saw equalled out of England. There are no soldiers about, as in a continental capital; and the policemen-nearly as fine a body of men, by the way, as our London police-appear to devote their energies to preserving Broadway from being utterly jammed up by carts, and to escorting ladies across that most treacherous of thoroughfares. The people seem instinctively to keep themselves in order. How a row would be suppressed if there was one, I cannot say; I only know that, during my stay in New York, I never saw anything approaching to a disturbance in any public place or thoroughfare.

But, in truth, everything there is so different from what one would expect it to be in theory. Under a democratic republic like that of New York State, where, practically, the suffrage is universal, one would expect that in all social matters the convenience and interests of the individual would be sacrificed to those of the public. The very contrary is the fact. The principle of vested rights-the power of every individual to consult his own inclinations in defiance of his neigh