No person conversant with many of the large provincial towns in England and Scotland, can conscientiously "throw a very large stone" at New York; for though much is doing among us to improve and sweeten--chiefly, thanks to the scourge of epidemics--I fear that in too many places we are still on this point "living in glass houses." Doubtless, New York is infinitely dirtier than London, as London at present is far less clean than Paris has become under the rule of the Third Napoleon.

I fully admit that it is not so clean as it should be, considering that the sum nominally spent on cleansing the streets amounts to very nearly sixty thousand pounds a year, a sum equal to one pound for every ten inhabitants; but the solution of this problem must be looked for in the system of election to the corporation offices, on which topic I propose to make a few observations in some future portion of these pages.

While on the subject of streets, I cannot help remarking that it always struck me as very curious that so intelligent a people as the Americans never adopted the simple plan of using sweeping carts, which many of their countrymen must have seen working in London.
If not thoroughly efficient, their ingenuity might have made them so; and, at all events, they effect a great saving of human labour.

But there is a nuisance in the streets of New York, especially in the lower and business part of the town, which must be palpable to every visitor--I mean the obstructions on the pavement; and that, be it observed, in spite of laws passed for the prevention thereof, but rendered nugatory from maladministration.

In many places, you will see a man occupying the whole pavement opposite his store with leviathan boxes and bales, for apparently an indefinite period, inasmuch as I have seen the same things occupying the same place day after day, and forcing every passer-by off the pavement.