out-houses and offices of various kinds. Here, too, rise the stately
turrets of the spacious new hospital styled the Verplanck Emigrant
Hospital, in honor of the great philanthropist, for such his constant and
noiseless labors in this department of charity entitle him to be called.

The Commissioners found that they could not protect the emigrants from
imposition without a special landing place from which they could wholly
exclude the rascal crew who cheated them. It took eight years to obtain
this from the New York Legislature, but at last, in 1855, it was granted,
and the old fort at the foot of Manhattan Island, called Castle Garden,
was leased for this purpose. This is now the Emigrants' Landing, the gate
of the New World for those who, pressing westward, throng into it from the
Old. Night and day it is open, and through this passage the vast tide of
stranger population, which is to mingle with and swell our own, rushes
like the current of the Bosphorus from the Black Sea towards the Propontis
and the Hellespont, to help fill the great basin of the Mediterranean.
What will be the condition of mankind when the populations of the two
hemispheres, the East and the West, shall have found, as they must, a
common level, and when the human race, now struggling for room in its
ancient abodes, shall look in vain for some unoccupied region where a
virgin soil is waiting to reward the laborer with bread?

As he enters Castle Garden the emigrant undergoes inspection by a
competent physician, and if he be aged, sick, or in any way disabled, the
master of the vessel must give a special bond for his maintenance. He is
introduced into the building--here he finds one department in which he is
duly registered, another from which he receives such information as a
stranger requires, another from which his luggage is dispatched to its
destination, another at which attend clerks, skilled in the languages of
continental Europe, to write his letters, another at which railway tickets