Through the grey mists that hang over the water in the late autumn afternoon there emerges a deeper shadow. It is like the serrated mass of a distant range of mountains, except that the sky-line is broken with a precision that suggests the work of man rather than the careless architecture of Nature The mass is compact and isolated. It rises from the level of the water, sheer on either side, in bold precipitous cliffs, broken by horizontal lines, and dominated by one kingly, central peak that might be the Matterhorn if it were not so suggestive of the spire of some cathedral fashioned for the devotions of a Cyclopean race. As the vessel from afar moves slowly through the populous waters and between the vaguely defined shores of the harbour, another shadow emerges ahead, rising out of the sea in front of the mountain mass. It is a colossal statue, holding up a torch to the open Atlantic.

Gradually, as you draw near, the mountain range takes definition. It turns to houses made with hands, vast structures with innumerable windows. Even the star-y-pointing spire is seen to be a casement of myriad windows. The day begins to darken and a swift transformation takes place. Points of light begin to shine from the windows like stars in the darkening firmament, and soon the whole mountain range glitters with thousands of tiny lamps. The sombre mass has changed to a fairy palace, glowing with illuminations from the foundations to the topmost height of the giddy precipices, the magic spectacle culminating in the scintillating pinnacle of the slender cathedral spire. The first daylight impression was of something as solid and enduring as the foundations of the earth; the second, in the gathering twilight, is of something slight and fanciful, of' towering proportions but infinitely fragile structure, a spectacle as airy and dream-like as a tale from the “Arabian Nights.”

It is “down town.” It is America thrusting out the spear-head of its astonishing life to the Atlantic. On the tip of this tongue of rock that lies between the Hudson River and the East River is massed the greatest group of buildings in the world. Behind the mountain range, all over the tongue of rock for a dozen miles and more, stretches an incalculable maze of streets, not rambling about in the easygoing, forgetful fashion of the London street, which generally seems a little uncertain of its direction, but running straight as an arrow, north and south, or east and west, crosswise between the Hudson and the East River, longwise to the Harlem River, which joins the two streams, and so forms this amazing island of Manhattan. And in this maze of streets, through which the noble Fifth Avenue marches like a central theme, there are many lofty buildings that shut out the sunlight from the causeway and leave it to gild the upper storeys of the great stores and the towers of the many churches and the gables of the houses of the merchant princes, giving, on a sunny afternoon, a certain cloistral feeling to the streets as you move in the shadows with the sense of the golden light filling the air above. And around the Grand Central Station, which is one of the architectural glories of “up town” New York, the great hotels stand like mighty fortresses that dwarf the delicate proportions of the great terminus. And in the Hotel MacAlpin off Fifth Avenue you may be whirled to the twenty-fourth floor before you reach the dining-room to which you are summoned.

But it is in “down town,” on the tip of the tongue that is put out to the Atlantic, that New York reveals itself most startlingly to the stranger. It is like a gesture of power. There are other cities, no doubt, that make an equally striking appeal to the eye—Salzburg, Innsbruck, Edinburgh, Tunis—but it is the appeal of nature supplemented by art. Generally the great cities are untheatrical enough. There is not an approach to London, or Paris, or Berlin, which offers any shock of surprise. You are sensible that you are leaving the green fields behind, that factories are becoming more frequent, and streets more continuous, and then you find that you have arrived. But New York and, through New York, America greets you with its most typical spectacle before you land. It holds it up as if in triumphant assurance of its greatness. It ascends its topmost tower and shouts its challenge and its invitation over the Atlantic. “Down town” stands like a strong man on the shore of the ocean, asking you to come in to the wonderland that lies behind these terrific battlements. See, he says, how I toss these towers to the skies. Look at this muscular development. And I am only the advance agent. I am only the symbol of what lies behind. I am only a foretaste of the power that heaves and throbs through the veins of the giant that bestrides this continent for three thousand miles, from his gateway to the Atlantic to his gateway, to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.

And if, after the long monotony of the sea, the impression of this terrific gateway from without holds the mind, the impression from within, stuns the mind. You stand in the Grand Canon, in which Broadway ends, a street here no wider than Fleet Street, but a street imprisoned between two precipices that rise perpendicular to an altitude more' lofty than the cross of St Paul's Cathedral—square towers, honeycombed with thousands of rooms, with scurrying hosts of busy people, flying up in lifts—called “elevators” for short—clicking at typewriters, performing all the myriad functions of the great god Mammon, who reigns at the threshold of the giant.

For this is the very keep of his castle. Here is the throne from which he rules the world. This little street running out of the Grand Canyon is Wall Street, and that low, modest building, looking curiously demure in the midst of these monstrous bastions, is the House of Morgan, the high priest of Big Money. A whisper from this street and distant worlds are shaken. Europe, beggared by the war, stands, cap in hand, on the kerbstone of Wall Street, with its francs and its marks and its sovereigns wilting away before the sun of the mighty dollar. And as you stand, in devout respect before the modest threshold of the high priest a babel of strange sounds comes up from Broad Street near by. You turn towards it and come suddenly upon another aspect of Mammon, more strange than anything pictured by Hogarth—in the street a jostling mass of human beings, fantastically garbed, wearing many-coloured caps like jockeys or pantaloons, their heads thrown back, their arms extended high as if in prayer to some heathen deity, their fingers working with frantic symbols, their voices crying in agonised frenzy, and at a hundred windows in the great buildings on either side of the street little groups of men and women gesticulating back as wildly to the mob below. It is the outside market of Mammon.

You turn from this strange nightmare scene and seek the solace of the great cathedral that you saw from afar towering over these battlements like the Matterhorn. The nearer view does not disappoint you. Slender and beautifully proportioned, it rises in great leaps to a pinnacle nearly twice as high as the cross of St Paul's Cathedral. It is the temple of St Woolworth. Into this masterpiece he poured the wealth acquired in his sixpenny bazaars, and there it stands, the most significant building in America and the first turret to catch the noose of light that the dawn flings daily over the Atlantic from the East. You enter its marble halls and take an express train to the forty-ninth floor, flashing in your journey past visions of crowded offices, tier after tier, offices of banks and publishers and merchants and jewellers, like a great street, Piccadilly or the Strand, that has been miraculously turned skywards by some violent geological “fault.” And at the forty-ninth floor you get out and take another “local” train to the top, and from thence you look giddily down, far down even upon the great precipices of the Grand Canon, down to the streets where the moving throng you left a few minutes ago looks like a colony of ants or black-beetles wandering uncertainly over the pavement.

And in the midst of the great fortresses of commerce, two toy buildings with tiny spires. You have been in them, perhaps, and know them to be large churches, St Paul's and Trinity, curiously like our own City churches. Once New York nestled under their shadows; now they are swallowed up and lost at the base of the terrific structures that loom above them. In one of them you will have seen the pew of George Washington still decorated with the flag of the thirteen stars of the original union. Perhaps you will be tempted to see in this inverted world an inverted civilisation. There will flash on your mind's eye the vision of the great dome that seems to float in the heavens over the secular activities of another city, still holding aloft, to however negligent and indifferent a generation, the symbol of the supremacy of spiritual things. And you will wonder whether in this astonishing spectacle below you, in which the temples of the ancient worship crouch at the porch of these Leviathan temples of commerce, there is the unconscious expression of another philosophy of life in which St Woolworth and not St Paul points the way to the stars.

And for the correction to this disquieting thought you turn from the scene below to the scene around. There in front lies the harbour, so near that you feel you could cast a stone into it. And beyond, the open Atlantic, with all its suggestions of the tide of humanity, a million a year, that has flowed, with its babel of tongues and its burden of hopes, past the statue with the torch that stands in the midst of the harbour, to be swallowed up in the vastness of the great continent that lies behind you. You turn and look over the enormous city that, caught in the arms of its two noble rivers, extends over many a mile before you, with its overflow of Brooklyn on the far bank of one stream, and its overflow of Jersey City on the far bank of the other. In the brilliant sunshine and the clear, smokeless atmosphere the eye travels far over this incredible vista of human activity. And beyond the vision of the eye, the mind carries the thought onward to the great lakes and the seething cities by their shores, and over the illimitable plains westward to sunny lands more remote than Europe, but still obedient to the stars and stripes, and southward by the great rivers to the tropic sea.

And, as you stand on this giddy pinnacle, looking over New York to the far horizons, you find your mind charged with enormous questionings. They will not be diminished when, after long jouneyings towards those horizons, after days and nights of crowded experiences in many fields of activity, you return to take a farewell glimpse of America. On the contrary, they will be intensified. They will be penetrated by a sense of power unlike anything else the world has to offer—the power of immeasurable resources, still only in the infancy of their development, of inexhaustible national wealth, of a dynamic energy that numbs the mind, of a people infinitely diverse, yet curiously one—one in a certain fierce youthfulness of outlook, as of a people in the confident prime of their morning and with all the tasks and possibilities of the day before them. In the presence of this tumultuous life, with its crudeness and freshness and violence, one looks back to Europe as to something avuncular and elderly, a mellowed figure of the late afternoon, a little tired and more than a little disillusioned and battered by the journey. For him the light has left the morning hills, but here it still clothes those hills with hope and spurs on to adventure.

That strong man who meets you on the brink of Manhattan Rock and tosses his towers to the skies is no idle boaster. He has, in his own phrase, “the goods.” He holds the world in fee. What he intends to do with his power is not very clear, even to himself. He started out, under the inspiration of a great prophet, to rescue Europe and the world from the tyranny of militarism, but the infamies of European statesmanship and the squalid animosities of his own household have combined to chill the chivalrous purpose. In his perplexity he has fallen a victim to reaction at home. He is filled with panic. He sees Bolshevism behind every bush, and a revolutionist in everyone who does not keep in step. Americanism has shrunk from a creed of world deliverance to a creed of American interests, and the “100 per cent. American” in every disguise of designing self-advertisement is preaching a holy war against everything that is significant and inspiring in the story of America. It is not a moment when the statue of Liberty, on her pedestal out there in the harbour, can feel very happy. Her occupation has gone. Her torch is no longer lit to invite the oppressed and the adventurer from afar. On the contrary, she turns her back on America and warns the alien away. Her torch has become a policeman's baton.

And as, in the afternoon of another day, brilliant, and crisp with the breath of winter, you thread your way once more through the populous waters of the noble harbour and make for the open sea, you look back upon the receding shore and the range of mighty battlements. The sun floods the land you are leaving with light. At this gateway he is near his setting, but at the far gateway of the Pacific he is still in his morning prime, so vast is the realm he traverses. The mountain range of your first impression is caught in the glow of evening, and the proud pinnacle that looked to the untutored eye like the Matterhorn or the temple of primeval gods points its delicate traceries to the skies. And as you gaze you are conscious of a great note of interrogation taking shape in the mind. Is that Cathedral of St Woolworth the authentic expression of the soul of America, or has this mighty power you are leaving another gospel for mankind? And as the light fades and battlements and pinnacle merge into the encompassing dark there sounds in the mind the echoes of an immortal voice—“Let us here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth!”

And with that resounding music echoing in the mind you bid farewell to America, confident that, whatever its failures, the great spirit of Lincoln will outlive and outsoar the pinnacle of St Woolworth.

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