New York has been in turn a Dutch village, an English town, and an American city. In its infancy it was wholly Dutch; but in its early youth the population was so leavened by English immigration that the transition to English control was less violent than one might expect it to have been. English influence was powerful even in Stuyvesant’s day; and when Stuyvesant was supplanted by Nicolls, the Dutch element was still powerful in the councils of the little town. The new ruler moved slowly and cautiously in anglicizing the government, and almost all the changes he made were for the better. The brief resumption of Dutch authority in 1673 was reactionary and wholly detrimental to the interests of the community; and, all things considered, the peaceful cession of the town to England, a year later, was the happiest chance that could possibly have befallen. [Illustration: SEAL OF THE CITY IN 1686.] A more violent and radical change was effected in 1689, when Jacob Leisler seized the occasion of the fall of the Stuart dynasty to grasp the reins of government which Andros had been forced to drop. By the aid of the militia and with the support of nearly all the less prosperous townsfolk, he administered public affairs till that good Dutchman William III. of England commissioned Governor Sloughter to hang the usurper and reign in his stead. Leisler’s rule had been in many respects an enlightened one, and years afterward his adherents succeeded in having his dishonored bones dug up and honorably reinterred. It was in this town, and at the instance of this earnest but ill-balanced and despotic champion of the poor, that the American Colonies took their first step toward concerted action, their objective being the overthrow of the French at Montreal. The most striking characteristic of New York has always been its cosmopolitanism. As Governor Roosevelt points out in his capital review of the city’s history, no less than eighteen different languages and dialects were spoken in the streets so long ago as the middle of the seventeenth century. The Dutch, the English and the Huguenot refugees from France predominated, but there were many Walloons and Germans, and a large body of black slaves. The riffraff of the Old World was to be found here, as well as the nobly adventurous; and, in fact, at all times since, the proportion of foreign-born residents has been very large. [Illustration: JOHN JAY.]