Castle Garden, on the Battery, gives on the loveliest and healthiest park of New York and the noblest harbor in the world. The main structure is old Castle Clinton, a large circular fort built early in the century for the protection of the city. Now it is converted to the uses of peace, to welcome invaders instead of repelling them, but still to protect the city, and the state and the nation. The open central space has been roofed over and converted into a great rotunda; while the embrasures and casemates designed for great cannon and magazines are used for baggage rooms and various apartments. This is better than hammering swords into plow-shares, this using forts to welcome ploughmen to our broad acres. Wooden excrescences around the wall provide offices, hospitals, insane asylums, labor bureaus, and various other departments. The rotunda and fort walls can accommodate 3,000 immigrants and their baggage—and do you know all that the words, immigrant’s baggage, implies? On this little amphitheater of war is daily held a Congress of All Nations. If you want to see Europe, come to Castle Garden, not go abroad. There is nothing left over there but the houses and the superfluous nobility and wealthy. Men are Europe, and the manhood of Europe is being skimmed off for America’s use. A gentleman told me that when he traveled in Circassia he looked in vain through the mass of awe-inspiring female ugliness for the famous types of Circassian beauty. “Where are the beautiful women?” he asked. “In Constantinople, all,” was the answer. So, he said, it is with the manliness of Europe—it goes to America. Not the most cultured, intelligent and favored. It would be small merit in them to break away and come to America; that they do not proves that they are too contented, fat and selfish for our use. But a man who, being born and trained to a life of subjection and dependence; rooted to the spot on which generations of his fathers have lived and died; who hardly knows whether his native hills or city streets bound the world or not—when one of these tears up his roots and sets out three thousand miles in search of a chance to breathe and grow, be sure, be very sure there is a spark in him of something that is wanted in this country. There is the germ of an American citizen; the growth of it will appear in a few generations. It is this surviving, vital spark of character that enables this nation to assimilate so much crude human material and convert the so-called “offscourings of Europe” into elements of national prosperity and strength. What could we have done in forty years with seven and a half million foreign aristocrats and capitalists? What would have become of us if they had come to us! A few of them have come lately, and they are already trying to build here a landed aristocracy, and on stolen land at that. Men should be estimated by the abuses and disadvantages they have survived, as well as by what they are. The courage, independence and