Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1883 edition. Excerpt: ... world, more largely than at the piers of New York; and finally with what to most modern communities appears to flash as a costly but brilliant diamond necklace, a public debt, beginning now to diminish, it is true, but still approaching, in net amount f 37,500,000! the future of new york and brooklyn. The child watches, in a happy wonder, the swelling film of soapy water into whose iridescent globe he has blown the speck from the bowl of the pipe. But this amazing development around us is not of airy and vanishing films. It is solidly constructed inmarbleand brick, in stone and iron, while the proportions to which it has swelled surpass precedent and rebuke the timidity of the boldest prediction. But that which has built it has been simply the industry, manifold, constant, going on in these cities, to which peace offers incentive and room. Their future advancement is to come in like manner; not through a prestige derived from their history; not by the gradual increments of their wealth, already collected; not by the riches which they pull to themselves from other cities and distant coasts: not even from their beautiful fortune of location; but by prosperous manufactures prosecuted in them; by the traffic which radiates over the country; by the foreign commerce which, in values increasing every year, seeks this harbor. Each railway, whose rapid wheels roll hither, from East or West, from North or South, from the rocks of Newfoundland or the copper deposits of Lake Superior, from the orange groves of Florida, the Louisiana bayous, the silver ridges of the West, the Golden Gate, gives its guarantee of growth to the still young metropolis. On the cotton-fields of the South, and its sugar-plantations; on coal mines and iron mines, on the...
