While New York is easily first among the cities of the New World in commercial importance, it is not on material bases only that her supremacy rests. No community throughout the world responds more generously to every appeal for sympathy or help, whether the call be local, national or foreign. Her interest is keen in educational work of every kind. Columbia University—one of the oldest of local institutions, and more than local in its aims and fame and influence—has of late, through the liberality of her sons and other citizens, been housed in a manner commensurate with her requirements and aspirations; and so also has the less venerable but justly honored New York University. And the past few years have seen Barnard College for women and the Teachers College (both allied with Columbia) emerge from the chrysalis state into forms of beauty and power. The public-school system, moreover,—thanks to a recent brief respite from Tammany control,—is in better condition to-day than at any previous period of Tammany administration. Of American literary activity, despite Boston’s ancient and deserved prestige, it cannot be denied that New York is to-day the centre, as it is the centre of the publishing trade, in books and periodicals. Boston, with her splendid Public Library, has set an example which the metropolis has been slow to follow; but the consolidation of the Astor, Lenox and Tilden collections, and their prospective housing in a magnificent and admirably situated building, has gone far to remove the reproach incurred during long years of public indifference to popular needs. The venerable Society Library, the modern and many-branched Free Circulating Library and kindred institutions have helped to create and in part to meet the demand which the Public Library in its new home may reasonably be expected to satisfy. Equally important in their way are those half-social, half-educational essays toward the solution of some of the problems of the slums—the University Settlement of men and the College Settlement of women. As a further indication that New York is not wholly given over to the worship of Mammon, it may be mentioned that the Greek Club, with its fortnightly meetings for the reading and discussion of the classics, has been for more than three decades the only circle of its kind in existence. [Illustration: WASHINGTON ARCH.] In art, the invaluable treasures of the Metropolitan Museum foster the love of what is enduringly beautiful in sculpture, painting, architecture, etc.; while the schools of this museum and of the National Academy of Design and the Society of American Artists, to say nothing of the more utilitarian classes of Cooper Institute and the School of Artist Artisans, afford instruction in art of such a sort as to render foreign study no longer indispensable, albeit no less attractive than of old.