spaces; the modern Babylon is a dense mass of humanity....

The Empire and the commercial relations of England draw representatives of
trading committees or subject races from all parts of the globe, and the
faces and costumes of the Hindu, the Parsee, the Lascar and the ubiquitous
Chinaman mingle in the motley crowd with the merchants of Europe and
America. The streets of London are, in this respect, to the modern what
the great Palace of Tyre must have been to the ancient world. But pile
Carthage on Tyre, Venice on Carthage, Amsterdam on Venice, and you will
not make the equal, or anything near the equal, of London.

Here is the great mart of the world, to which the best and richest
products are brought from every land and clime, so that if you have put
money in your purse you may command every object of utility or fancy which
grows or is made anywhere without going beyond the circuit of the great
cosmopolitan city. Parisian, German, Russian, Hindu, Japanese, Chinese
industry is as much at your service here, if you have the all-compelling
talisman in your pocket, as in Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Benares,
Yokohama, or Peking. That London is the great distributing center of the
world is shown by the fleets of the carrying trade of which the countless
masts rise along her wharves and in her docks. She is also the bank of the
world. But we are reminded of the vicissitudes of commerce and the
precarious tenure by which its empire is held when we consider that the
bank of the world in the middle of the last century was Amsterdam.

The first and perhaps the greatest marvel of London is the commissariat.
How can the five millions be regularly supplied with food, and everything
needful to life, even with such things as milk and those kinds of fruits
which can hardly be left beyond a day? Here again we see reason for
excepting to the sweeping jeremiads of cynicism, and concluding that tho