We see, then, nothing in the future that is very likely seriously to disturb the continued growth and increasing ascendancy of the great mart of the country. A trading people will pursue its interests under any conceivable or tolerable condition of things. It would require a generation or two, indeed, to obliterate, or even sensibly to diminish the habits and opinions now in existence among the people; and it must ever be remembered that society pursues its regular course more or less successfully, according to circumstances, even in the midst of revolution, war, and rapine. A battle is fought to-day, and a month hence it becomes difficult to discover its traces, over which the p{l}ough has already passed, and among which the husbandman is resuming his toil, as he replaces his fences, and clears away his fallen trees after the passage of the whirlwind. It follows from these views, and this course of reasoning, which might be greatly extended and much more satisfactorily developed, that political changes have less direct influence on the ordinary march of society than is commonly supposed. The spirit of the age is and must be respected by rulers of every shade of character; and the fourth estate, as opinion is commonly termed, enters largely into the ordinary action of every form of government or combination of social organization that the accidents of history have produced, or the sagacity and wants of men have more ambitiously paraded before the eyes of their fellow creatures. When we couple with these facts the certainty that there are undercurrents which enable ordinary society, trade, and all the other active and daily recurring interests of life, to manage their own affairs more or less in their own way, it is not easy to foresee any material consequences to the progress of a place like this at the mouth of the Hudson, that can trace their rise to the future course of political events in the country. We do not anticipate any apparent dissolution of the ordinary ties of society, for we know that nations will bear burdens of this nature for a long period of time, without struggling or making the effort necessary to remove them; and that it is only when they are felt to be intolerable to the great body of the people that one may confidently hope for redress and reformation. Petty wrongs are never repaired by the masses; they sometimes vindicate their rights by means of the strong arm, when seriously required to do so, but in general the wrong is endured, and the victim immolated without awakening attention or leaving any regrets among those who escape its immediate consequences.