P 128 .37 .Mil Copy 2 THE GENIUS OF THE COSMOPOLITAN CITY An Address DKI.IVKRF.D KKFORE CI)e jSeto lorlv Historical ^otitt^ ON ITS NINETY-NINTH ANNIVERSARY, TuKSDAY, November 17, 1903, BY Mr. HAMILTON W. MABIE. NEW YORK PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY 1904 THE GENIUS OF THE COSMOPOLITAN CITY An Address DELIVERED BEFORE Cf)e jBteto forfe f|t£Storical ^ocietp ON ITS NINETY-NINTH ANNIVERSARY, Tuesday, November 17, 1903, Mr. HAMILTON V\^f MABIE. A^i^r-i^ YORK PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY 1904 10 ia. OFFICERS OF THE SOCIETY, 1904. PRESIDENT, SAMUEL VERPLANCK HOFFMAN. FIRST VICE-PRESIDENT, FREDERIC WENDELL JACKSON. SECOND VICE-PRESIDENT, FRANCIS ROBERT SCHELL. FOREIGN CORRESPONDING SECRETARY, ARCHER MILTON HUNTINGTON. DOMESTIC CORRESPONDING SECRETARY, GEORGE RICHARD SCHIEFFELIN. RECORDING SECRETARY, SYDNEY HOWARD CARNEY, Jr., M.D. TREASURER, CHARLES AUGUSTUS SHERMAN. LIBRARIAN, ROBERT HENDRE KELBY. EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE. FIRST CLASS FOB, ONE YEAR, ENDING 1905, JOHN A. WEEKES, J. PIERPONT MORGAN, GEORGE R. SCHIEFFELIN. SECOND CLASS FOR TWO YEARS, ENDING 1906. F. ROBERT SCHELL, DANIEL PARISH, Jr., FREDERIC WENDELL JACKSON. THIRD CLASS FOR THREE YEARS, ENDING 1907. ISAAC J. GREENWOOD, CLARENCE STORM, JAMES WILLIAM BEEKMAN. FOURTH CLASS FOR FOUR YEARS, ENDING 1908. GHERARDI DAVIS, WALTER L. SUYDAM, FRANK TILFORD. DANIEL PARISH, Jr., Chairman. ROBERT H. KELBY, Secretary. [The President, Recording Secretary, Treasurer, and Librarian are members of the Executive Committee.] THE GENIUS OF THE COSMOPOLITAN CITY. The New York Historical Society has now laid the corner-stone of a structure which is to be, for many years to come, not only the repository of its valuable collections and the home of its activ- ities, but the sign and symbol of the unbroken life of the metropolis. Beginning- its career ninety- nine years ago, this Society was first housed in the old City Hall, in which the Congress of the United States held its sittings after the adoption of the Constitution, and on the balcony of which Wash- ington was inaugurated first President of the Re- public. The growth of the city during the century has been registered by the steady progression of the Society northward. Six times it has changed its quarters and each change has carried it farther from its original base. Now, for the eighth time, it finds a new home for itself and one far more com- modious and beautiful than any in which it has heretofore been housed. When Chancellor Kent spoke on this anniver- sary seventy-six years ago he declared that the Dutch colonial annals are of " a tame and pacific 5 6 TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. character, and generally dry and uninteresting-." To us they are rich not only in the materials which give color and movement to narrations of fact, but in the humor and pathos which are the soul of fic- tion. When George Bancroft spoke at the semi- centennial celebration, twenty-four years later, the larger meaning of the beginnings of the city and the Republic had become clear. " Our land," he said, " is not more the recipient of the men of all countries than of their ideas." And after enumerat- ing the gifts of India and Palestine, of Greece and Rome, of Spain, France, Italy, Holland and Eng- land to the American state, he declared that our country stands " more than any other as the reali- zation of the unity of the race." Twelve years later, on the sixty-second celebration of this anni- versary. Dr. Osgood saw the spiritual significance of the city realized in part: " Here already, in its best hours," he said, " our New York has glimpses of the true human fellowship, which is the organ- ized liberty of the nineteenth century." It is because we have learned the vitality of the ties that bind us to the past and make us, in body and mind, in ideal and institution, the children of our fathers, that history has taken on a new and deeper meaning for us. The Greeks, with charac- teristic insight, made Memory the Mother of the Muses ; for neither knowledge, nor song, nor art, nor religion, nor society are possible without memory. TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 7 History is the memory of the race ; that memory which age leaves undimmed, and which time deep- ens and broadens with the sweep of years. Here, where New York Hves and will live, not in the tumult and rush of the moment but in the unbroken life of the centuries, the Soul of the Metropolis makes its record, and here they who seek to un- derstand its genius must come. It has been said of a certain American city that it is not a place but a state of mind. Truth is often spoken in jest, especially if the jest have the savor and insight of wit ; and there is a half-truth in this bit of humorous characterization. There is something more in a city than its visible order, its material structure, its drives and parks and mu- seums and works of art ; there is its spirit. Every city has a genius, a spiritual individuality, as dis- tinctive as the genius of the greatest man who grows up in its shelter. For a city is something more than a collection of persons ; if you are try- ing to understand what it stands for in the world you will get little aid from the directory; it is an entity which records and reveals itself in many ways, remaining itself invisible. It has many of the qualities and attributes of personality ; it thinks, it feels and it acts. And in thinking, feeling and act- ing it is not a composite person, made up of the traits of all its citizens ; it is a force distinct from them ; an influence which does not emanate wholly from them, but definitely, persistently and power- 8 TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. fully affects them. It makes a very real difference whether one is born in Boston or in New York or in Charleston. Each of these cities has its own history, ideals, point of view ; and the child can no more escape the influence of these potent elements of education than it can escape the climatic influ- ences which rise out of the earth and pervade the atmosphere. Genius, an American essayist has said, is not a single power but a combination of great powers. The genius of a city is a power created by a com- bination of powers of earth and of air ; by its loca- tion, the circumstances which determined its earli- est activities, the quality and force of the men who laid its foundations, the reflex influence of its leaders in successive generations. And this soul of a city, which gives inspiration, direction, color to its mani- fold life, attains at last such definite individuality that it is unconsciously personified and becomes the genius of the city, the spirit of the locality ; that searching, penetrating influence, which broods over childhood, and gathers about itself the senti- ment of maturity, and takes on a kind of radiance from the memories of age ; an influence which our ancestors of Latin blood embodied in those lesser deities with whom they lived in the inti- macies of the home, the field, the footpath and the spring. Florence, Venice, Edinburgh, Boston and New York not only differ in the aspects they wear to the TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 9 eye, but still more in the impression they convey to the imagination. Venice and Florence were sep- arated by a little stretch of two hundred and fifty miles, but if they had been as far apart as the ends of the earth they could hardly have differed more radically in the years when their activities were at the flood. It is a five hours' journey from New York to Boston, but what numerals could express the divergence of their points of view ? This differ- ence, it is well to remember, is not expressed in terms of superiority or of inferiority but of varia- tion. If I say that the New England capital breathes a more rarefied air than the metropolis I do not necessarily mean that the souls of the good are made perfect there more rapidly than here. If I speak of the repose of that hospitable city which still cherishes the virtues of the Friends, I do not neces- sarily imply that a man can save his soul as well as his nerves more easily in Philadelphia than in New York. If I comment on the swiftness of the move- ment of life in Chicago, I do not necessarily mean that a man reaches desirable ends there more quickly than here. It is an interesting fact that, while American cities are prone to gibe at one an- other, they are all agreed in regarding New York as the most material, luxurious, money-loving and unmoral community in the new world. It has be- come a tradition that whatever New York is, it is not intellectual, religious, moral, homogeneous, beautiful, or American ; and New Yorkers have be- lo TJic Genius of the Cosuiopolitan City. come so accustomed to this state of the provuicial mind that they long ago ceased to deny, to explain, or to apologize. We may all be persons of foreign birth ; we may not know people on our own block ; we may waste our bodies and despoil our souls be- low Fourteenth Street in order that our wives and daughters may wear Paris gowns on Murray Hill ; we may pay pew-rent in fashionable churches, and spend so much time in Lenox, Newport, Florida, Southern California and on the Riviera that we are useless for religious work ; all these things, which citizens of other cities lay at our doors, we may be and do ; but, in view of our silence and patience under accusation, one virtue we may claim : the cosmopolitan virtue of geniality. When Boston disapproves of our devotion to business, and Phila- delphia is pained by our easy forgetfulness of an- cestral qualifications, and Chicago points the fin- ger of scorn at the deliberation of our movements we do not reply in kind. It may be that we have sunk too low ; it may be that we have seen too many phases and crazes come and go ; it may be that we have attained the cosmopolitan virtue of at- tending strictly to our own affairs ; it may be that we have so much to do that we have accepted as our rule of life a famous counsel of Dr. Jowett's to a friend who was going through a fiery furnace of criticism : " Retract nothing, explain nothing, get it done, and let them howl." This great city of ours, with its diversities of TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 1 1 race, of religion, of social, political and personal ideals — has it a unity which the country has as yet failed to recognize, a genius which belongs to the future rather than to the past, and which, because it is of the future, is slow to reveal itself? We forget that New York is not only the first of cities of modern birth in magnitude of population and interests, but that it is also a city of a new type. Its very diversities are creating here a kind of city which men have not seen before ; in which a unity of a more inclusive, if not of a higher, order is slowly forming itself; a city the genius of which has the light of prophecy in it. From its earliest beginnings, New York has been a composite community ; location, settlement, com- merce and original population determined its type at the very start. What it is to-day on a great scale it was when only a handful of houses were irregularly grouped about the fort on the Battery. The noble harbor and the low, grassy point of land on which the future cosmopolitan city was to rise, were first seen by an Englishman, holding a Dutch commission, commanding a crew of rough sea-dogs drawn from the seaports of England and from the dykes of Holland, in a high-built, clumsy craft of Dutch make, but bearing an English name. The Half-Moon, coming up the harbor on a September day in 1609, two years after the settlement at Jamestown and eleven years before that at Ply- mouth, was a typical forerunner of a vast flotilla, 12 The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. bearing men and women of many races, from all parts of Europe, to feed the population of a city which is affiliated by racial ties with all parts of the globe. Love of nature was by no means the foremost interest of the crew of the Half- Moon, but that first voyage up the Hudson, when Tap- pan Zee slept in a September haze and the purple shadows softened the outlines of the Catskills until they lay against the western sky like dream-moun- tains, must have touched the quick, passionate seventeenth century imagination. The thrifty, adventurous Dutch, who knew so well how to curb and how to use the sea, whose keen intelligence, resolute will and capacity for heroic endeavor are revealed in the faces that look down from the walls of the galleries of the Hague, Haar- lem and Amsterdam — men whose features have often been caricatured, but whose spirits bore the touch of the highest distinction, if Rembrandt and Franz Hals are to be believed — were not slow to follow up the opening for trade in the new world ; for then, as now, the underlying motive in international activity was gaining access to more customers and a wider distribution for native products. The earliest buildino^s in New York were the huts of fur-traders, and the first permanent settle- ment was made and the first orovernment conducted by a commercial corporation of such magnitude that it does not greatly suffer by comparison with simi- The Goiiiis of the Cosmopolitan City. 13 lar organizations to-day. The West India Com- pany, chartered by the States General of Holland, like the Hudson Bay Company and the English East India Company was endowed by law with those governmental privileges and powers which are still surreptitiously exercised by their corporate suc- cessors. And it was not without sio-nificance that o the West India Company, authorized not only to trade in the new country, but to govern as well, started upon its career as a fully-developed mo- nopoly. Thus, at the very beginning, trade and monopoly stood sponsors for the city of the future. In New England, a little later, they were praising God and killing the Indians with right good will ; in Virginia they were building up vast estates, shipping tobacco to England, and living merrily in the wilderness, sharpening the dull edge of frontier life with the racing of horses, the fighting of cocks, and those liberal potations which have not ceased to be mixed in that genial country ; in New York they were selling for as much and buying for as little as possible. The commercial instinct, which we all deplore without for a moment giving up the luxuries with which it surrounds us, was more frankly avowed in New York than in the colonies to the north and south ; but it is to be feared that it was not a whit more controlling at the bottom. Piety did not blunt the business sagacity of the New Englander ; and renunciation was not the habitual practice of the Virginia colonists. 14 TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. There is a good deal of choice in the matter of descriptive words ; some words are much better- bred than others ; but the dispassionate student of history is compelled to admit that they often de- scribe the same conditions. At the west end of the beautiful old church at Dives, on the coast of Nor- mandy, whence William the Conqueror set sail for England in 1066, is inscribed the long list of the names of his companions in arms. These names have taken on a golden hue in the softened light of almost nine centuries ; but it is to be feared that close scrutiny of the aims of the men who bore them would reveal quite as much self-seeking, greed and general unscrupulousness as marked the dealings of the New Englanders with the Indians, of the Virginians with one another, and of the primitive New Yorkers with the rest of the world. The mailed knight who beat the life out of his fel- low in order that he might possess his lands and bequeath them to his own heirs and assigns for- ever, was not, after all, much more a gentleman than his less imposing brother who, by the arts of peace and in ways of pleasantness, persuaded his fellow to part with his property at something be- low its cost. The early settlers of New York were not greedy sinners, with a colony of saints at the north and a colony of chivalrous and self-sacrificing gentlemen at the south ; they were, like all the other colonists, saints at times and sinners at others ; serving God and Mammon after the man- Tlic Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 1 5 ner of all their ancestors and a large majority of their descendants. They were not only traders, but sailors and soldiers, who braved all manner of perils that they might buy and sell, and faced calmly all the chances of fortune that they might increase their posses- sions. The commercial instinct worked alonof he- roic lines and was rarely divorced from the courage and endurance which went far to redeem the greed of the seventeenth century as they go far to re- deem that of the twentieth. Never was there a more shocking example of the enormity of the unearned increment than is afforded by the fact that New York was bought in 1626 for $24 ! There were then about two hundred people living about the Battery, and wolves and bears wandered at will in the neighborhood of Grace Church and Union Square. It was a small com- munity which was first known as New Amsterdam ; a weak outpost of civilization, with an old world behind it perilous to reach in the clumsy yachts of the time, and a new world of savage life and mysterious depths of forest before it. But it was already a cosmopolitan community, with a mix- ture of races and a confusion of tongues prophetic of the later city. The Dutch were in possession of the government and — what was far more impor- tant — of the monopoly ; but there were Englishmen, Frenchmen and Germans living side by side with them ; and during the forty years of Dutch su- 1 6 TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. premacy, these main streams of population flowed with fairly even current. As conditions became more settled immigration of a higher grade fed the little frontier town, and men of substance, entitled to use those coats of arms which have been so extensively pillaged in our own time, came in increasing numbers to become the founders of influential colonial families, and to give the popular movements of a later day coura- geous and competent leadership. Of men of the class known in the' old world as gentlemen there were as many in New Amsterdam and along the Hudson to Albany as in Virginia, in South Caro- lina or in Massachusetts. They came from the cities of Holland, from old and from New England, from Germany and from France ; but the most in- fluential men of the colony were Dutchmen, English- men and Frenchmen. The first brought staying power and solid qualities of many kinds ; the Eng- lishman brought his highly trained capacity for government; the Huguenot his power of devotion, and that charm of manner which was to give the rough setting of social life on the edge of the wil- derness a touch of old-world dignity and refine- ment. Then there was a mixed population, made up of apprentices and redemptioners, largely of Eng- lish and Irish blood ; for the Irish — for good and for ill, for pleasure and for pain, in prosperity and in adversity—have always been with us, to con- tribute to our many-sided life the irresistible charm TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 17 and the wayward impulses of the Celtic tempera- ment. There was a considerable representation of the shiftless, incompetent and irresponsible among the white population ; and there was a considerable group of slaves, recently imported from Africa and but a little removed from the savage state. No less than eighteen languages and dialects were spoken in the little town. There were, a little later, great patroons ruling estates hundreds of miles square ; there were sub- stantial houses, with broad halls and spacious rooms, furnished with those huge four-post, cano- pied beds in which our well-to-do ancestors smoth- ered on summer nights ; there were massive cab- inets and tables; the walls were hung with portraits as significant of family pride as they were free from all suggestions of art; there were great clocks and heavy silver plate glorious with blazonry of arms. There were rambling, old-fashioned gardens, laid out with mathematical exactness, but redolent of the fragrance of old-fashioned flowers and dear to the birds which are of a fashion of God's making. There were ladies in beautiful apparel ; for our grandmothers were quite as attractive as their grand- daughters ; there were gentlemen in silk stock- ings and knee-breeches and velvet doublets and long coats, ornamented with silver ; for in those stirring days man was far more free to make him- self beautiful than in these monotonous days of London fashion-plates and no color save an occa- l8 The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. sional flash of the old audacity in his neckwear. There was much eating and deep drinking; there was persistent seeking of pleasure, for our ances- tors were singularly like ourselves. And there were men and women in hovels, ignorant and wretched and vicious ; and there were semi-savage slaves. It is clear that New York began her civic career with a full equipment of the conditions and problems which perplex the modern city. She had many races to unify : many diversities of religion, language and social ideal to harmonize ; many apparently antagonistic elements to fuse into one homogeneous community. She had diversity and variety — prime elements in the cosmopolitan city ; she had also in very early times the quality which makes the blending of these elements possible — toleration. The Dutch Lutheran, the English Churchman and the French Calvinist lived together on a basis of mutual recog- nition of differences of creed and practice. The taking of the oath of allegiance made men of all faiths, save one, equal before the law. Quakers and Baptists, fleeing from the militant conscience of New England, found refuge in New Amsterdam, and Roman Catholics were later included in this broad zone of toleration. The old church in the fort on the Battery was a symbol of the larger comprehension and wider sympathies of a later day ; in the morning, within its bare but hospitable walls, a service was held in Dutch, at mid-day in TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 19 French, and in the afternoon in EngHsh ; while the Roman CathoHcs worshipped in a chapel close at hand. There is no evidence that these Christians were corrupted by their friendly relations with one another ; and their descendants are every whit as loyal to their religious convictions as are the de- scendants of the men who, in that age, were beat- ing out one another's brains because they could not agfree on a standard translation of the funda- mental article of the Christian religion, " God is love." In the beginning there was not only religious liberty, but political equality as vv^ell. The port of New York was as open in the seventeenth century as it is in the twentieth. There was no statue of liberty in the harbor in those days, but men of every faith and race found the same welcome when they set foot in the little town. Seventeen years after the organization of the colony in New Am- sterdam a popular meeting was called by a direc- tor whose lack of wisdom and moderation had brought the community to the verge of ruin, and a council of representative men formed ; and this council promptly protested against the arbitrary measures of the director, and demanded sub- stantial self-ofovernment. In an aee in which Puritan and Churchman were laying unfriendly hands on one another in England, and Louis the 14th was withdrawing the protec- tion of the government from the Huguenots and by 20 TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. one more act of stupidity was striking at the roots of moral stability in France, and men of many nations were hedging political rights about with all manner of religious restrictions, New Yorkers went to church when and where they liked, and were counted before the law as of one blood. ■ When the colony passed under English rule, their civil and religious rights were guaranteed to the Dutch, and the privilege of naturalization to all foreigners was reaffirmed. The English element in the population had long been influential, and the only change effected by the lowering of the Dutch and the raising of the English flag at the Battery, was the shifting of the balance of power from one group of citizens to another. The second English ruler of the city — a charming gentleman of Cavalier breeding, who bore the name of the most gracious of Cavalier singers, Lovelace — won all hearts by equal intimacy with the English, the French and the Dutch, and in a club which he organized the three languages were spoken ; and the English service was still held in the Dutch church. In 1683, the Duke of York, the patron of the city, whose name has in consequence at least one pleasant and credi- table association, granted to the colony a charter, by the terms of which the right of self-taxation (with certain minor exceptions), of self-govern- ment, and liberty of conscience and of religion were guaranteed to all. This charter, James, Duke of York, graciously signed and sealed but forgot to The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 21 deliver; a slip of memory which James, become the second of his name on the English throne, omitted to make good. The colony proceeded, however, as if this generous document were in force ; and one of the earliest acts taken under it was the confer- ring of all the rights of citizenship upon all white for- eigners who should take the oath of allegiance. These broad lines of tolerance and equality, thus early marked out in New York, were not always consistently respected ; and the city was to pass through many changes of civic order before the success of the party of liberty in the War of the Revolution made this wide foundation of freedom of thought and action, of equality of creeds before the law, and equality of races in the rights and privileges of citizenship, permanent ; but the note struck thus early, was expressive of its spirit and prophetic of its history. It was to be a cosmopolitan or world-city ; a place where the races were to mingle with mutual respect and toleration, to give the new world a metropolis of a new type. While the men of the Massachu- setts colonies were drawing ecclesiastical lines about the franchise, the men of New York, who had apparently a higher opinion of God or of themselves, were throwing all the doors open and inviting everybody to come in. Our hospitality, thus early illustrated to the world, has cost us a good deal in many ways, and we are still bearing its burdens and meeting its draughts on our faith. 22 TJie Genius of the Cosnwpolitan City. our patience and our generosity. It has given our friends in the provinces, south and west, the op- portunity of saying that New Yorlv is the least American of cities because it is the least homoge- neous. But it is fair to ask " which is the most distinctively American, the community in which the citizens are all of one blood, or that in which many races combine to create a new race?" If America . is simply an extension of England in the new world, then New York is the least American of cities ; but if America stands for a different order of society, a new kind of political and social unity, a fresh ar- rangement of the various families of men on a freer and broader basis, then New York is the most American of cities. As there is nowhere in the world purity of race, in the sense of one blood flowing without interfu- sion of other blood for a long term of years, it is clearly a relative matter. We are all immigrants ; the only difference between us is one of dates of arrival. Those of us who came early are inclined to draw the line at the Revolution, and to assert that the only pure American is of colonial descent. This is, however, an arbitrary division, and its chief use is to serve as the occasion for the organization of certain pleasant ancestral societies, and the eating of a number of excellent dinners every winter with the cheerful feeling that only the oldest fami- lies are represented at the festal board. For we all came here in ships as our English ancestors TJie Genius of the Costnopolitaii City. 23 came to their delightful island, driving out the first families with such thoroughness, that no trace of them remains in the society of to-day, and then pro- ceeding to form other and later families of Saxon and Norman stock with the masterful assurance of the rulinof races. For Americans, as for Eno-Hsh- men and many other races, the alternatives are de- scent from savages or from immigrants. No single vessel brought all the settlers and all their furniture in one voyage to New York. That feat has been performed but twice in the history of the world ; and much eloquence has made both the Ark and the Mayflower distasteful to us. We came in many ships ; some of us came in the first cabin and some in the steerage— the Ark and the Mayflower are the only ships in which all the passengers were the same grade ; we sailed from many ports ; we had many creeds and were accustomed to many kinds of social and political habit ; and we have been living together, not ideally, but peacefully, prosper- ously and with a growing liking for one another, for a matter of almost three hundred years — that is the story of New York in a paragraph. Its full meaning becomes clear only when it is placed side by side with the story of the discords, the strifes, the deep-rooted racial and religious animosities of one great group of cities and with the simpler prob- lems, the narrower interests and sympathies of the cities of homogeneous population. The homoge- neous city has virtues and charms which the cos- 24 TJie Genius of tJic Cosmopolitan City. mopolitan city lacks ; but it has also defects and limitations which the cosmopolitan city escapes. It is a city of a type as old as Bagdad and Damascus ; the cosmopolitan city is of the new type ; made pos- sible by the levelling of the old walls of racial ig- norance and prejudice ; prophetic of the new order- ing of society in a working fraternity of races. The City of New York was founded by a great trading company in possession of a monopoly ; but this company, like all other human organizations, was curiously compounded of selfishness and ideal- ism ; it was bent on profits, but it was also bent on doing the Lord's work according to its lights, and smiting with a mighty hand the power of the King of Spain in the western waters. In the pursuit of its double purpose, the Dutch West India Company filled its coffers with the contents of the Spanish treasure ships ; gave substantial aid to the other semi-commercial, semi-governmental companies, large and small, which swept the Spanish main with a resolute audacity and a calculated recklessness that have their place among the great traditions of daring ; broke the Spanish power at its sources ; set the Netherlands free from the paralyzing hand of Spain ; made popular government possible in America by establishing the supremacy of the Eng- lish language and the English and Dutch political ideals ; and developed New York as the product and symbol of this re-ordering of society. In the final summing up of great enterprises it may appear that TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 25 in the movement of which New York was the fruit a service was rendered to the race quite as great as the service of those cities which grew out of a sin- gle strenuous endeavor for better conditions along a single line. Speaking reverently, Providence has breadth as well as height, and fertilization is as im- portant as elevation. Founded by traders, as many of the great cities have been founded. New York has always been a centre of immense commercial interests and activ- ity. Its noble harbor has seen, for almost three centuries, the coming and going of ships laden with cargoes from the ends of the earth. It is signifi- cant that the earliest product of human skill here was a ship ; built, Mr. Janvier thinks, on the creek which once flowed where Broad Street now runs, and near the point where it joins Pearl Street. The Dutch builders called this forerunner of the com- merce of New York the " Onrust,"— the " Rest- less " ; a name significant alike of their hopes and spirits, and of the world-wide activity of the me- tropolis. The first faint lines of discovery have always been the lines of trade ; and traders were the earliest and, far and away, the most fruitful of all the ex- plorers. In the dawn of history, the caravans are seen moving across the desert from city to city ; at a later day, trading ships were skirting the shores of the Black Sea, and finding their perilous way past the pillars of Hercules to the tin mines of Corn- 26 TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. wall ; later still, they were crossing the Atlantic to fish off the coasts of Newfoundland, and making the long voyage around the Cape of Good Hope to bring back the spices and silks of the East. Some of us who care greatly for art and science and religion have fallen so completely into the habit of speaking of commerce as if it were in itself a thing of evil that w^hen we profess our devotion to art other men, with a keener sense of reality, re- fuse to take us seriously and declare that we are following an artificial and vain image, and not one of those ultimate forms of expression which are the final flowering of individual genius and of the spirit of man. The real question concerns not the neces- sity, the educational power, the spiritual signifi- cance of commerce ; these things are beyond all question in the light of history and of any real thinking ; the real question concerns the value we put on commerce in comparison with religion, art, science, the state. To invert the true order and make religion, art, science and politics the servants of commerce is to bring in moral anarchy ; to pur- sue commerce with passionate eagerness that life may be broader, richer, nobler in habit and habita- tion is to transform a material energy into a spirit- ual opportunity ; and this sublime miracle, — this turning of the grape that is fed by the soil and nur- tured by the hand into the wine that gives words and wings to the spirit, — has been wrought again and again. Society still thinks largely in terms of TJic Genius of tJic Cosuwpolitan City. 27 asceticism ; a noble expression of a by-gone age. It learns slowly that virtue lies not in a process of exclusion but in setting the gifts and graces of life in a spiritual order. We are not in the world to surrender, but to command its resources of all kinds ; we are not here to abdicate, but to govern. The way out of the perils which surround us is not by becoming poor, but by learning how to use our wealth like rational creatures of God's makine. New York has always been deeply interested in ships and canals and railways, the means and in- struments of communication which have made the modern world possible and brought in, in a rough preliminary way, the brotherhood of man. She has sometimes cared too much for these things ; like Paris, London, Boston, Philadelphia and Chi- cago, she has often thought more about comfort than about righteousness ; and when she has fallen from grace she has suffered humiliation and borne various kinds of punishment. These things have come to her, however, not because she has been commercial but because she has confused means with ends. There is nothing corrupting in com- merce ; it is as honorable to found a city for trad- ing purposes as to suddenly descend upon a coun- try with galleys, put its inhabitants to the sword, and take possession of their estates in the name of William of Normandy. Commerce is a peaceful and increasingly honest substitute for the wholesale thieving of feudal times. 28 Tlie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. And when it comes to the matter of art it is well to remember that Venice, the most poetic render- ing- of civic necessities in terms of architecture that the world has ever known, was the first commer- cial city of a great period ; that her palaces were built because the ships that lay at their doors were laden with the treasures of the East ; that the art which translated her religious and civic ideals into a language so splendid, so commanding, so signifi- cant of greatness of spirit, was cherished, guarded and loved by great merchants rather than by great princes ; that, speaking soberly, life has never been so magnificently dressed as in a city whose genius for commerce these later times have not surpassed. It is well to remember that Florence, mother of great personalities, so completely mistress of the arts that she spoke with equal ease and authority in architecture, sculpture, painting and poetry, was a city whose rulers were called merchant princes. The men who founded New York were among the foremost traders of their time ; but who has loved liberty with a more passionate devotion than they, and where does the genius of man interpret the soul of man with more commanding and search- ing power than on the walls of the galleries of the Hague, of Haarlem and of Amsterdam ? In this city, in the year 1809, American literature was born. Books had been written in the colonies and, later, in the states before " Knickerbocker's History of New York " appeared ; but these earlier Tlie Genius of the Cosvwpolitaii City. 29 books were historical, religious, or polemical trea- tises ; they were contributions to causes ; Irving wrote as birds sing and flowers bloom ; because man was made to live, not by work alone, but by the free expression of all the interests of his spirit. Two elements in Irvino^'s work are sicrnificant for the present purpose : he was the earliest interpre- ter of the old world to the new ; he, more than any other among the pioneers of American literature, reknit the sundered peoples by bringing back, with all the charm of tender sentiment and o-entle hu- o mor, the ripeness and beauty of the old home. There are no real breaks in history. This is a new country, but we are an old race ; we brought the old world with us in our memories or we should have been poor indeed. Homer recalled to the Greeks the fading memories of Asia, Virgil re- minded the Romans of the days and deeds on the plains of Troy, Irving brought the imagination of an alienated people once more into touch with the traditions of their old home and their kin beyond the sea, and became the earliest interpreter of the spirit of the cosmopolitan city. " His kindly and pervasive humor had as little in common with the keen, pungent New England humor as his genial and urbane spirit had with the strenuous, ethical temper of New England. The rigidity of the Puri- tan, the concentration of the reformer, were alien to his tolerant nature. The intense feeling for the locality, the emphasis on the section, characteristic 30 The Genius of the Cosviopolitan City. of the south from an early period, were equally alien to him. He was a true child of the metropo- lis ; tolerant in temper because he was on easy terms with many different races, urbane and gra- cious because he had found virtue in many kinds of men, charm in many kinds of women, and sincerity in many kinds of religion ; with a vein of deep and tender feeling running through his nature and his work, but always relieving the strain of emotion with that touch of humor which makes men kin. The qualities of the cosmopolitan city were all his : urbanity of manner, breadth of view, tolerance of temper, and a kindly, easy, genial attitude toward life. There was no strain of didacticism in Irving, but there was an attitude toward life which gave his work a beautiful quality of sympathy. " If, how- ever," he wrote to a friend, " I can, by a lucky chance, in these days of evil, rub out one wrinkle from the brow of care, or beguile the heavy heart of one moment of sadness ; if I can, now and then, penetrate the gathering film of misanthropy, prompt a benevolent view of human nature, and make my reader more in good humor with his fellow beings and himself, surely, surely, I shall not then have written in vain. This is the temper of a true citi- zen of a metropolis — a place where races meet and mingle on easy terms ; slowly and often blindly, but none the less surely, through mutual comprehen- sion and the tolerance that comes from it, defining TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 31 in terms of experience the unity of the race and re- aHzing the brotherhood of man." * The interpreter of the old world to the new, this genial man of letters, was a creator of two priceless American legends, and the originator of the short story ; a literary form of which Americans have gained a notable mastery. Here, too, the first piece of genuine fiction appeared when Cooper, in "The Spy," broke ground for the novelists of the future. From the creation of the delightful myth of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the first of the long line of gentlemen who have gone to Albany leav- ing unsettled accounts in New York, to the days of Mr. Howells' " Letters Home," the cosmopoli- tan qualities of broad human sympathy, deep in- terest in human experience, and recognition of the fact that another man's conscience may be as au- thoritative as your own, have never passed out of our writing. In the title of the novel which is likely to stand beside " The Rise of Silas Lapham " in the judgment of posterity Mr. Howells has hap- pily suggested the larger meaning of New York ; it is " A Hazard of New Fortunes." The later novelists have not failed to notice and report the picturesque aspects of the metropolis ; Mr. Matthews especially has emphasized the tow- ering lines which it shows as one approaches it along the great water-ways, the flashing of myriad lights from the great buildings at night, the clouds * Backgrounds of Literature. By Hamilton W. Mabie. 32 The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. of steam which float, mingling and commingHng, over the city, and give it a touch of mysterious and ethereal beauty. The genius and the place of New York in the modern world are so clearly disclosed in this brief recital of significant passages in its history that he who runs may read. The very conformation of the harbor seems like a symbol of hospitality. Two converging lines of coast lead to it from the vast- ness of the sea, and so uniform is the shelving of the coast for a hundred miles in either direction that the ship can find her way on the blackest night, in the densest fog, with no other guide than the plummet. Inside the water gate what a spa- cious refuge ! No one can come up from the sea, with the richest memories of Europe behind him, and not feel the charm which resides in the noble moulding of the harbor lines, the beauty of its fram- ing of hills, the half-veiled vision of the new world of toil and wealth and unlimited resource which rises before the imagination as the group of cities defines itself and the great bridge swings in air be- tween them. In no other city do the tides of life mingle with such a sweep and in such a volume. New York is not one city; it is many cities under one govern- ment. Once a Dutch city, a French city, an Eng- lish city ; it has become a German, Irish, Italian, Russian, Polish, Armenian, Hebrew, Syrian city. The eighteen languages spoken here in colonial The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 33 times have grown to sixty-six languages and dia- lects ; in one school in the Syrian district of the city twenty-nine languages and dialects are spoken. And the incoming tide has risen to such a height that thoughtful men are asking whether so many strangers, bred in such diverse faiths and habits of life, can be so rapidly housed in American ideas and clothed with American associations. Here, too, from all parts of the country, flows the refluent wave of those who, having come to great and often sudden prosperity, seek the ampler spending ground of the metropolis. These are the people for whom our theatres are multiplied ; for whom immense apartment houses are built ; above all, these are the people who shine resplendent in gorgeous apparel in the most obtrusively magnifi- cent of our hotels. One of the chief functions of New York in recent years has been to furnish the United States of America with adequate opportu- nities of spending its money, and giving it expert assistance in the process. The metropolis has be- come a school for the education of untrained pro- vincial millionaires, who come here in great num- bers from all parts of our vast country, bringing their local customs with them. And it is the hard fate of New York to be judged by the manners and bearing of its guests, the journals of civilization in remote quarters holding up their hands in hor- ror over the extravagance of those who have come to us from their own neighborhoods. Placed 34 The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. where the sea brings throngs of immigrants from the western limits of Ireland, to those remote and vague distances where "the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay," and where the rivers and railways bring in throngs of highly pecunious immigrants from that vast central plain over which the smoke of Chicago hangs as the cloud once hung over another city of the plain ; from the upper reaches of the Mississippi ; from Denver, modest and shy metropolis of the mountain region ; from San Francisco, feverish with dreams of the time when the Atlantic shall be an abandoned waterway ; and from the South, hospitable, gener- ous, lovable, with just a touch of condescension in its manner toward us ; placed, I say, where all these tides meet and mingle, is it strange that New York is difficult to govern, to understand, to define ? It is easy to put one's hand on the defects and vices of the commercial age and spirit. The feudal period was far more picturesque, the period of the monarchy far more splendid, to the eye. The world is a more crowded and a much noisier place than it was in the days when Warwick Castle and those desolate piles on the Rhine were built, in the days when Louis the Magnificent planned his vast palaces. But the whole of life does not reside in the things which comfort and delight the eye, pre- cious as they are. Behind those apparitions of what seems, through the mist of years, a better TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 35 time, what misery of body, what wretchedness of condition, what bondage of the spirit ! They cost too much, those old refinements and splendors. France starved and went in rags, and men became wild and greedy as animals, that the stately pageant of Versailles might be played for a few inglorious years. And the pageant itself, studied closely, re- veals a moral squalor, a poverty of spiritual ideas, a lack of nobility which invest it to-day with an air of tragic mockery. The charm of the old order was bought at too great a price of enforced sacrifice of opportunity, health, education, that freedom of the spirit without which, in the finest trappings, men are puppets or slaves. The old order seems har- moniously beautiful, largely because our ignorance of the thousand details of condition and habit which environed it hides its ugly aspects from us ; and its best things were paid for by those who could not share them. The commercial age, on the other hand, enfolds us so closely that no man can understand its ulti- mate significance or foresee its final development. That it is provisional and not permanent, a stage and not the ultimate form of social organization, is, however, the inevitable conclusion of the student of history and of social science. One thing is clear — it is a far more inclusive ordering of men in social relations than has been known before. Selfish as it is, it opens more doors, makes more opportunities, ofiers more kinds of help, cares more and does more 36 The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. for all men, than any earlier ordering- of society in antiquity or in the Middle Age. Commercialism and democracy involve no more crudity and vulgarity than did the rule of the aris- tocracies in Greece and Rome, of Feudalism and Monarchy in western Europe ; they simply do not keep crudity and vulgarity in the background. Athens had her Cleon, Rome had her mobs whose greasy caps offended Shakespeare, England had her Wat Tylers fingering with dirty hands the robes of royalty. Most people judge by appear- ances, and appearances are against modern life. There are, perhaps, a dozen persons in a genera- tion whose knowledge of present and past con- ditions is intimate enough, and whose minds are broad enough, to qualify them to make compari- sons and reach conclusions ; all other judgments are worthless. It is far too soon to pass judg-ment on the sig- nificance of the commercial age and the soundness and value of democracy ; the modern world is so complex and vast that it behooves us to study it more clearly and speak of it less confidently. When one realizes the depth and vastness of the movement of life, the mystery out of which it flows and in which it loses itself, the clouds that gather and pass above it, the roar and tumult which attend it, the com- parison of civilization with civilization on the basis of the relative production of books and pictures at any particular period, of dress and manners and The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 37 social habit in any given country, seems pitifully inadequate. In three hundred years it may be pos- sible to reach some conclusion about the real mean- ing of commercialism and democracy ; to-day one can only be sure that society is being reorganized in a more inclusive way, that governments rest on a broader base, that the free expression of every man's personality becomes every decade more com- plete, and that men are learning to live together in all the ways of thought and of action. Of these dominant forces of modern life. New York is the product. It has its full share of cru- dity, vulgarity and selfishness ; it is rich also in aspiration, refinement, distinction of aim and man- ner. It is a cosmopolitan city in its liberality, its tolerance, its comprehension of the vast variety of human experience, its sympathy with the manifold objects of human interest, its hospitality to the faiths, the traditions, the races of mankind. There have been cosmopolitan cities since the days when a Greek dynasty ruled in Alexandria, and Jewish and Oriental teachers taught all manner of ancient learning on the banks of the Nile ; but never be- fore have so many races met and ruled together, without race, religious or class distinctions, as in New York. Here is being formed the city of the future ; for the future is to be the common posses- sion of all men on a basis of equality of opportu- nity. Here, some of us venture to believe, is being worked out, on a great scale, in much tumult, con- 38 The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. fusion and uncertainty, but with an irresistible drift at the bottom, that problem of setting all men free to be and to do which will ultimately evoke the highest in human character and achieve- ment. PROCEEDINGS. PROCEEDINGS OF THE SOCIETY. The Ninety-ninth Anniversary of the founding of the New York Historical Society was celebrated on Tuesday afternoon, November 17, 1903, by laying the corner-stone of the Society's new building, on Central Park West, Seventy-sixth to Seventy-seventh Streets, and later by an address entitled " The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City," delivered by Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie. The of^cers, members, and guests of the society assem- bled in the Wood Room of the American Museum of Natural History, and from there crossed to the site of the corner-stone. Mr. Samuel Verplanck Hoffman, President of the Society, called the assembly to order, and intro- duced the Rev. Charles Edward Brugler, who delivered the Invocation. The President delivered an historical outline of the Society from its founding in 1804 to 1903, and concluded the same with a brief account of the memorabilia con- tained in the copper box which was placed within the corner-stone. The President introduced the Hon. Seth Low, LL.D., Mayor of the City of New York, who laid the corner-stone of the Society's new building, using a silver trowel with an ebony handle, the trowel having an appropriate inscrip- tion engraved thereon. The assembly returned to the Lecture Hall of the American Museum of Natural History, where the anni- 41 42 Proceedings of the Soeiety. • versary address was delivered by Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie. Upon its conclusion, Mr. Fordham Morris, with re- marks, offered the following resolution, which was sec- onded by Mr. George R. Schieffelin, and unanimously adopted : Resolved, That the thanks of The New York Historical Society be, and they hereby are extended to Mr. Hamil- ton W. Mabie, for his able, learned, and eloquent address of November 17, 1903, on the occasion of the laying of the corner-stone of the new building of the Society and the Ninety-ninth Anniversary of its founding, and that Mr. Mabie be requested to furnish a copy of his address so that it may be published by the Society and be deposited with its Archives. Extract from the minutes. Sydney H. Carney, Jr., Recording Secretary. LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS (9 014 108 657 1