"The assessors' return of the wealth of Boston will probably show this year an aggregate property of nearly three hundred millions. This sum, divided among 160,000 people, would give nearly $2,000 to each inhabitant, and will show Boston to be much the wealthiest community in the United States, save New York alone, with four times its population. The value of the real estate in this city is increasing now with great rapidity, as at least four millions of dollars' worth of new houses and stores will be built this year. The personal estate in ships, cargoes, stocks, &c., is greatly increasing with each succeeding year, not withstanding the many disasters and losses constantly occurring in such kinds of property. "It is impossible to get the exact earnings of the nearly six hundred thousand tons of shipping owned in this city. But perhaps it would not be much out of the way to set the total amount for 1855 at from fifteen to twenty millions of dollars. This sum has probably been earned by our fleet engaged in the domestic trade, and in commercial transactions with the East and West Indies, South America, the Pacific, Europe and Africa. The three sources from which the population of Boston is maintained, and its prosperity continued, are these: Commerce, trade, and manufactures. Its annual trade and sales of merchandise are said now, by competent judges, to amount to three hundred millions of goods per annum, and will soon greatly exceed that vast sum. The annual manufactures of this city are much more in amount than in many entire States in this Union. They amount, according to recent statistics, to nearly seventy-five millions of dollars." Freeman Hunt, the accomplished editor of _Hunt's Merchants' Magazine_, writing on the "Progressive Growth of Cities," says:-- "London is now the greatest concentration of human power the world has ever known. Will its supremacy be permanent? or will it, like its predecessors, be eclipsed by western rivals? New-Yorkers do not doubt, and indeed have no reason to doubt, that their city, now numbering little more than one-third of the population of London, will, within the next fifty years, be greater than the metropolis of the British empire. "New York, with her immediate dependencies, numbers about 900,000. Since 1790 she has established a law of growth which doubles her population once in fifteen years. If this law continues to operate, she may be expected to possess 1,800,000 in 1871, 3,600,000 in 1880, and 7,200,000 in 1901. If twenty years be allowed New York as her future period of duplication, she would overtake London by the end of fifty years; London _may_ then have five millions; New-York will almost certainly have more than that number.