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changes, and of changes such as perhaps are not usually imagined, nor always, when realized, sources of satisfaction.

A comparative retrospection could not begin from a more distinctive date than that of 1837. Just three decades ago that year came, like the year 1867, in a period of depression, anxiety, and paper money. Mr. Van Buren was President of the United States, and Edward Everett was Governor of Massachusetts. Boston, a thriving city of eighty thousand inhabitants, was, relatively to the whole country, a much more important place than at present.

In its physical aspect the city has certainly changed since then. Its proper limits were necessarily much the same then as now, but its appearance was more picturesque and old-fashioned. The commercial centre of the town was still its business centre. The manufacturer as well as the merchant clustered around State Street once King Street - and the old wharves and warehouses of Colonial times. Those, too, were the days of old-fashioned, roomy houses, before the "seventeen-foot front" came in. Not yet had the increasing volume of the business community, bursting its limits, sent its tide of granite fronts, like a destroying flood of lava, over the quiet, shady streets, pretty gardens, and substantial, square, court-enclosed residences, the last of which have only just disappeared. The place has grown larger, but, unlike New York or Chicago, it is still the same place. For notwithstanding many local and individual changes, streets which were fashionable in 1837 are fashionable now; the same families not seldom live in the same houses; the wealthy names then are wealthy names still, and the men of note then are men of note now. The change has been simply the comparatively slow change of growth and expansion: it has been the change neither of creation nor of revolution.

The moral, social, and political questions agitating that community in 1837 were curiously the same with those still matters of earnest discussion. Railroads had begun to produce their effects, and the whole country was speculating, - speculating not in coppers or oil mines or gold mines, but in what answered the purpose quite as well,- in Western lands, in produce, in imports, in manufactures, and in exports. In 1837,

as well as in 1867, the papers and society rang with a universal outcry against the absurdly high prices of the day, and the enormous cost of living. The whole world was making short cuts to fortune, and heaping up great wealth in paper dollars. In that same year came the crash; the banks suspended, the merchants were ruined, and provincial Boston was large enough to report one business failure a day during a period of six months; gold was at ten per cent premium, and the newspapers teemed with plans for the resumption of specie payments. In the Legislature the questions then discussed were curiously the same with those discussed in the same halls in 1867. The temperance question had begun to loom up, the fifteen-gallon law was passed, and the bar-rooms were for the first time closed on Sundays. Then, too, a novel experiment was tried, a hotel (the Marlborough) was established "on temperance principles." The repeal of the usury laws was discussed, as also the expediency of passing a law regulating the hours of labor, known as the "Ten-Hour Law.” literature, also, the Athens of America still sounds the old harp-strings. In the year 1837 R. W. Emerson delivered a 4. B. K. oration, as he did in 1867; Caleb Cushing declined to address the societies of Dartmouth College, and Mr. George S. Hillard took his place. Dr. O. W. Holmes brought out a little volume of poems, and the second volume of an interminable History of America, by George Bancroft, was published.

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Commercially, Boston was for that time a city of great foreign trade and enterprise. Ships unloaded at her wharves from China, from Calcutta, from the African coast and the Mediterranean, from Russia, South America, and the Pacific coast. Only two years before the house of Sturgis had originated the California trade by sending out the Alert, with the author of "Two Years before the Mast" in her forecastle. Then and for years after Boston was considered the natural American terminus of the Liverpool trade, and Train's " Diamond Line" of fast Liverpool packets, which ran successfully for fifteen years, and transported one hundred and forty thousand passengers, was not originated until 1844. Since those days the population within the city limits has more than doubled, and has overflowed those limits into every suburban

town. The industrial increase has been eightfold. In 1866 the money value of the manufactures of the city was returned at eighty-six millions of dollars, against less than eleven millions, the return of 1837, and exactly equalling the return of the whole State for that year. Its wealth has increased fourfold since that time. Its debt has increased more than sevenfold. Its rate of taxation has increased threefold, but its foreign commerce has not increased at all in the same ratio. Until within the last dozen years the foreign trade of the city flourished satisfactorily; but hidden causes must have been at work, for the crisis of 1857 seems to have given it a shock from which it has never recovered. Between 1836 and 1855, the yearly foreign entrances and clearances of the port of Boston rather more than doubled, and the gross numbers of each have not materially declined to the present time; but the character of the commerce has changed. Though nominally foreign, nine tenths of those clearances and entrances are of vessels engaged in the coasting trade in everything but the name. They are not stately ships, rich in the association of distant lands, bringing teas and spices from the East and wines and silks from Europe, to return laden with corn and gold and oil; they are Down-East coasters, averaging somewhat more than a hundred tons' measurement each, and carrying on a thriving business in facilitating the exchange of coal and firewood, fish, rags, and timber, the staples of the Provinces, for the ready-made boots and furniture, the butter, molasses, and manufactured tobacco, the produce of New England.† Thus, though the same number of sails as in 1855 now enter and leave Boston Harbor, in the course of each year, from or for foreign ports, yet in 1862-63, as compared with the

Clearances. 1836: 1,358; tons, 204,334. 1855: 2,944; tons, 687,825. 186263 (average), 3,110; tons, 623,411. Entrances. 1836: 1,381; tons, 224,684. 1855: 3,144; tons, 707,924. 1862-63 (average), 3,120; tons, 662,008.

† During 1862-63 Boston averaged each year 3,110 foreign clearances, aggregating 623,411 tons; of these 2,256, aggregating 320,921 tons, that is, more than half of all the clearances from Boston, measured by tonnage, cleared for the British Provinces; and during the same period, of a yearly average of 3,120 entrances, aggregating 662,008 tons, 2,162, or 281,074 tons, were from the same quarter. The trade of Boston beyond the seas during the same period averaged yearly 400 each of entrances and clearances, aggregating 240,000 tons, a decrease, estimated in tonnage, of forty per cent from the return of 1856.

earlier year, their aggregate tonnage had decreased ten per cent, and the value of their imports, having fallen off fifty per cent, had almost sunk to the level of 1836; while their exports, though double the value of those of 1836, had also fallen away one half in ten years.

Not so New York. Her commerce has never ceased to grow. Entering and clearing in 1836 less than double the tonnage of Boston, and scarcely more than doubling it in 1855, - for Boston yet held her own bravely, in 1862-63 her tonnage was fourfold that of Boston; and while her trade with the American foreign ports of the North Atlantic was little if at all larger than that of Boston, her traffic beyond the seas was nine times as great.* The trade of Boston with the British Provinces was during those years more than twice that of New York; with Great Britain the trade of New York was more than ten times that of Boston.† The same rule of change holds in the value of the commerce. In 1836 New York imported and exported, as compared with Boston, in about the ratio of five to one; in 1855 the ratio was as less than four to one, but in 1862-63 it stood at ten to one, and during the last three years (1864–1866), while the New York imports as compared with those of Boston have held the ratio of seven to one, her exports have stood as thirteen to one. A relative importance reduced from one fourth to one

For ports beyond the seas, New York in 1862-63 cleared yearly 2,601 sail, aggregating 1,858,939 tons, and entered yearly from the same 2,548 sail, aggregating 1,939,212 tons, against 388 clearances from Boston, aggregating 207,585 tons, and 469 entrances, aggregating 280,673 tons.

† In 1862-63 Boston cleared for the British Isles on a yearly average 76 sail, aggregating 89,631 tons, and entered from them 100 sail, aggregating 151,071. New York cleared 1,327 sail, aggregating 1,202,957 tons, and entered 1,115 sail, aggregating 1,118,205 tons.

The foreign commerce of Massachusetts, almost wholly through Boston, at the periods referred to, was as follows:- Imports, 1836, $25,681,462; 1855, $45,113,774; 1862-63 (average), $ 29,545,041; 1864 - 1866 (average at Boston only), $ 36,676,214. The exports were, 1836, $5,267,160; 1855, $28,190,925; 1862-63 (average), $19,653,267; 1864 1866, (average at Boston only), $19,417,856. Of New York, and almost wholly through the port of New York, the imports were,-1836, $118,253,416; 1855, $164,776,511; 1862-63 (average), $223,353,864; 1864 1866 (average at port of New York alone), $ 249,827,121. The exports were, 1836, $29,000,000 ; 1855, $113,731,238; 1862-63 (average), $238,375,185; 1864 1866 (average at New York only), $245,388,233.

tenth, and an absolute loss of some fifty per cent, is a result singularly suggestive as the lesson drawn from the experience of a single decennium.

To return, however, to the decade of 1830-1840. A new era then opened on the world, for steam was working out its application to locomotion on land and to ocean navigation. The race was open to all; it was almost a clear field without favor. At that time Boston enjoyed several advantages. In 1837 she possessed the best developed germ of a railroad system in all America. She sent out ten trains a day on her finished lines to Lowell, Providence, and Worcester. Already her plan of great railroad extension was matured. The present Western Railroad was projected, and, in projecting it, the men of those days seem to have risen to an equality with the occasion; for, in the language of 1837, this road was "to extend from Worcester to the Connecticut River, at Springfield, and thence to the boundary line of the State of New York, where it will connect with railroads now in progress, one leading to Albany, another to Hudson, and a third to Troy. From Albany a railroad line to the westward is already completed as far as Utica, and its continuation is projected through the State of New York to Buffalo, thence through the northern part of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, across Illinois, to the Mississippi." Such a scheme speaks well for the day of small things.

As late as 1840 Boston was also the best balanced commercial city in America. When the Cunard line was established in that year, it naturally fixed its terminus in Boston. "The reasons for this choice were, nearness to and convenience of access from the lower British Provinces and Lower Canada; a shorter distance from Europe; and superiority of harbor and wharf accommodations. The railway system of New England, also, although in its infancy, had already attracted attention in Europe. . . . . The establishment of a regular line of firstclass steamships between Liverpool and Boston hastened the construction and extension of the railroads which had been commenced, and led to the projection of others. As a consequence Boston was for a few years possessed of a combination of railway and steamship facilities such as no other city on the

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