The daily dispatch. [volume] (Richmond [Va.]) 1850-1884, 1854-08-19
oUTsIDE LIFE.

Mr.. Foster, author of " New York in
Slices. in his last production, Fifteen Mn
utes around New York, = makes the following
reflections, opropos Of Tayfor's great ice
creamery in that city:
This gigantic establishment, where we are, Is
but exhsIation from the hollowness, hypoerisy,
and insincerity Of the times. We hra on the side-
walk; We dine, dress, tall, and make society, In
ancc Our shops have oil their goods 10 the street
window; women are made OF cotton, and the ideas
fhat should enrich their brains. ara developed Ia
haunting nnery upen their bonnets. Even our
splendid hotels aud public houses are veneered with
marbie and stuffed with old brick bats-their mag
nincence y only skin deep. The parlors are pala-
uai, whilst the bedrooms would dkgrace a coun-
ny tavern. Our steamboat builders spend q hun
dred thousand dollars in useless fiummery and gsu-
~ upholstery, and save two dollars q month by
employing an ignoramus or drunkard for engi-
neer. who blows the whole concern to the devil on
the first fair opportunity
Our newspapers cut each others threats, and
speno shousends upon thousands in printing the
Sheets and getting the earliest intelligence
~ telegraph, Of events which would be deemed ut
y inngniicanthad they transpired under their own
noses-and even our churches exhaust the purses
OF their congregations In building spacious edhces
and furnishing them extrayagantiy, while hundreds
OF miserable God and man forsaken wretches swe'.
very walls. Ostentation and heartlessness are the
wees OF the day land their worst feature H. that
Whilst they make 30 many wretched, they DO mol
confer either dignity or happiness upon their own
ers little taste, little aspiration for refinement.
and little genuine human nature, would be mil
non times better than this universal human cryca
palace Int which the world ID arranging itseif.
This Is unquestionably correct picture Of
life in New York. Yet that city was once as
respectable, as transformations, as substantial
city, as any of its size in the world. Inc
broad bottomed old Dutchmen who founded
New Amsterdam, and their descendants fol
many long year, were as worthy and unpre
tending people as any upon whom the sur
shone; and none the less so that they were
uncompromising shareholders. But the race
of the Knickerbockers has almost entirely dis
appeared from New York, and in their stead
has come from all the world a population O.
money hunters and money makers, greedy
sensual remorseless, brutal, selfish to the las
degree, and thoroughly ignorant of every
thing but the great art and mystery of max
ing money. Fortunes have been accumula
ted in New York with amazing rapidity by
men whose education,is confined to know
ledge of arithmetic, and who cannot spell
their own language correctly. Where such
men are the leaders of society-where they
constitute the upper Ten, can be
expected but hollow show and vulgar osten
tation They have no aspirations beyond
the qualification of their own vanity, no pri
vate virtue which would not be better salts
fed with the semblance of morality than
with the thing itself, and no public spirit
which would not be as well content with a
yeneering imitation of beauty and substance,
as with walls of marble and foundations OF
adamant. ... .