Year.Population.Year.Population.
16561,0001820123,706
16732,5001825166,089
16964,3021830202,589
17318,6281835270,068
175610,3811840312,852
177321,8761845371,223
178623,6141850515,394
179033,1311855629,810
180060,4891860814,254
181096,37318641,000,000+

Taking the first census as a point of departure, the population of New York doubled itself in about eleven years. During the first century it increased a little more than tenfold. It was doubled again in less than twenty years; the next thirty years quadrupled it; and another period of twenty years doubled it once more. Its next duplication consumed the shorter term of eighteen years. It more than doubled again during the fifteen years preceding the last census; and the four years since that census have witnessed an increase of nearly twenty-three per cent. This final estimate is of course liable to correction by next year's census, but its error will be found on the side of under-statement, rather than of exaggeration.

The property on the north-west corner of Broadway and Chamber Street, now occupied in part by one of Delmonico's restaurants, was purchased by a New York citizen, but lately deceased, for the sum of $1,000: its present value is $125,000. A single Broadway lot, surveyed out of an estate which cost the late John Jay $500 per acre, was recently sold at auction for $80,000, and the purchaser has refused a rent of $16,000 per annum, or twenty per cent on his purchase-money, for the store which he has erected on the property. In 1826, the estimated total value of real estate in the city of New York was $64,804,050. In 1863, it had reached a total of $402,196,652, thus increasing more than sixfold within the lifetime of an ordinary business-generation. In 1826, the personal estate of New York City, so far as could be arrived at for official purposes, amounted to $42,434,981. In 1863, the estimate of this class of property-values was $192,000,161. It had thus more than quadrupled in a generation.

But statistics are most eloquent through illustration. Let us look discursively about the city of New York at various periods of her career since the opening of the present century. I shall assume that a map of the city is everywhere attainable, and that the reader has a general acquaintance with the physical and political geography of the United States.

Not far from the beginning of the century, Wall Street, as its name implies, was the northern boundary of the city of New York. The present north boundary of civilized settlement is almost identical with the statutory limit of the city, or that of the island itself. There is no perceptible break, though there are gradations of compactness, in the settled district between the foot of the island and Central Park. Beyond the Park, Haarlem Lane, Manhattanville, and Carmansville take up the thread of civic population, and carry it, among metropolitan houses and lamp-posts, quite to the butment of High Bridge. It has been seriously proposed to legislate for the annexation of a portion of Westchester to the bills of mortality, and this measure cannot fail to be demanded by the next generation; but for the present we will consider High Bridge as the north end of the city. Let us compare the boundary remembered by our veterans with that to which metropolitan settlement has been pushed by them and their children. In the lifetime of our oldest business-men, the advance wave of civic refinement, convenience, luxury, and population has travelled a distance greater than that from the Westminster Palaces to the hulks at the Isle of Dogs. When we consider that the population of the American Metropolis lives better, on the average, than that of any earthly capital, and that ninety-nine hundredths of all our suffering poor are the overflow of Great Britain's pauperism running into our grand channels a little faster than we can direct its current to the best advantage,—under these circumstances the advance made by New York in less than a century toward the position of the world's metropolis is a more important one than has been gained by London between the time of Julius Cæsar and the present century.

I know an excellent business-man who was born in his father's aristocratic residence in Beaver Street. Holborn is as aristocratic now. Another friend of mine still living, the freshest of sexagenarians, told me lately of a walk he took in boyhood which so much fatigued him, that, when he was a long way out in the fields, he sat down to rest on the steps of a suburban hospital. I guessed Bellevue; but he replied that it was the New York Hospital, standing in what we now call the lower part of Broadway, just opposite North Pearl Street. No part of the Strand or of the Boulevards is less rural than the vast settled district about the New York Hospital at this day. It stands at least four times farther within than it then did beyond the circumference of New York civilization. I remember another illustration of its relative situation early in the century,—a story of good old Doctor Stone, who excused himself from his position of manager by saying, that, as the infirmities of age grew on him, he found the New York Hospital so far out in the country that he should be obliged, if he stayed, to keep "a horse and cheer."

Many New-Yorkers, recognized among our young and active men, can recollect when Houston Street was called North Street because it was practically the northern boundary of the settled district. Middle-aged men remember the swamp of Lispenard's Meadow, which is now the dryest part of Canal Street; some recall how they crossed other parts of the swamp on boards, and how tide-water practically made a separate island of what is now the northern and much the larger portion of the city. Young men recollect making Saturday-afternoon appointments with their schoolfellows (there was no time on any other day) to go "clear out into the country," bathe in the rural cove at the foot of East Thirteenth Street, and, refreshed by their baths, proceed to bird's-nesting on the wilderness of the Stuyvesant Farm, where is now situate Stuyvesant Park, one of the loveliest and most elegant pleasure-grounds open to the New York public, surrounded by one of the best-settled portions of the city, in every sense of the word. Still younger men remember Fourteenth Street as the utmost northern limit of the wave of civilization; and comparative boys have seen Franconi's Hippodrome pitched in a vacant lot of the suburbs, where now the Fifth Avenue Hotel stands, at the entrance to a double mile of palaces, in the northern, southern, and western directions.

We may safely affirm, that, since the organization of the science of statistics, no city in the world has ever multiplied its population, wealth, and internal resources of livelihood with a rapidity approaching that shown by New York. London has of late years made great progress quantitively, but her means of accommodating a healthy and happy population have kept no adequate pace with the increase of numbers. During the year 1862, 75,000 immigrants landed at the port of New York; in 1863, 150,000 more; and thus far in 1864 (we write in November) 200,000 have debarked here. Of these 425,000 immigrants, 40 per cent have stayed in the city. Of the 170,000 thus staying, 90 per cent, or 153,000, are British subjects; and of these, it is not understating to say that five eighths are dependent for their livelihood on physical labor of the most elementary kind. By comparing these estimates with the tax-list, it will appear that we have pushed our own inherent vitality to an extent of forty millions increase in our taxable property, and contributed to the support of the most gigantic war in human annals, during the period that we received into our grand civic digestion a city of British subjects as large as Bristol, and incorporated them into our own body politic with more comfort both to mass and particles than either had enjoyed at home.

There are still some people who regard the settlement of countries and the selection of great capitals as a matter of pure romantic accident. Philosophers know, that, if, at the opening of the Adamic period, any man had existed with a perfect knowledge of the world's physical geography and the laws of national development, he would have been able to foretell a priori the situations of all the greatest capitals. It is a law as fixed as that defining the course of matter in the line of least resistance, that population flows to the level where the best livelihood is most easily obtained. The brute motives of food and raiment must govern in their selection of residence nine tenths of the human race. A few noble enthusiasts, like those of Plymouth Colony, may leave immortal footprints on a rugged coast, exchanging old civilization for a new battle with savagery, and abandoning comfort with conformity for a good conscience with privation. Still, had there been back of Plymouth none of the timber, the quarries, the running streams, the natural avenues of inland communication, and to some extent the agricultural capabilities which make good subsistence possible, there would have been no Boston, no Lynn, no Lowell, no New Bedford, no healthy or wealthy civilization of any kind, until the Pilgrim civilization had changed its base. It may be generally laid down that the men who leave home for truth's sake exile themselves as much for the privilege to mere opportunity of living truly.

New York was not even in the first place settled by enthusiasts. Trade with the savages, nice little farms at Haarlem, a seat among the burgomasters, the feast of St. Nicholas, pipes and Schiedam, a vessel now and then in the year bringing over letters of affection ripened by a six months' voyage, some little ventures, and two or three new colonists,—these were the joys which allured the earliest New-Yorkers to the island now swarming from end to end with almost national vitalities. Not until 1836, when the Italian Opera was first domiciled in New York, on the corner of Leonard and Church Streets, could the second era of metropolitan life be said fully to have set in there,—the era when people flow toward a city for the culture as well as the livelihood which it offers them. About the same time American studios began to be thronged with American picture-buyers; and there is no need of referring to the rapid advance of American literature, and the wide popularization of luxuries, dating from that period.