There is a mysterious and startling lack of harmony between the constituents of the [New York] City's life. The people do not know their next-door neighbors, and are not concerned with what happens on the block next to theirs; and they bustle about their business without seeing or knowing vast secitons of the City that are directly affecting their social affairs, and indirectly touching all of their interests The City bounds forward under a general impulse of growth, leaping along the pathway of material progress with incredible speed; and yet its citizens, in large part, are indifferent to the concerns of their neighbors, and are oblivious to the advantage of mutual civic interest and popular combinations of civic effort.
Political organizers alone powerfully use the advantages of cooperation and coordination of popular forces for public purposes. Those who are unselfishly interested in the advancement of virtue and true prosperity have not yet learned to combine their large numbers and to pull together.
Is there a single trait, characteristic of the entire City, continuous through its history and dundamentally connected with its development? There is great philanthropy--in streaks; there is corruption--in places; there is old-time Americanism--in sections; there is Continental liberality--in spots all over; there is Puritanism--to match the LIberality; but the Spirit of Tolerance is New York's peculiar characteristic. This spirit operates in all affairs--busniness, social, religious, political--and proceeds from an unconscious but all-controlling realization of the duty of minding our own business and letting other people mind theirs.
Tolerance was essential to the development of the commerce for which New York has always been preeminent. It was the natural outgrowth of the commercial spirit. Even in the strained relations arising from the "excise question," when one class of citizens parades tableax of LIberty, in tears, surounded by the Muses weeping because they cannot have free beer on Sunday, and another class demands that the liquor business shall be entirely extirpated--between these two extremes stands the conservative mass of citizens, who manage to see some claims on each side, to tolerate both sections of extremists, and to provide a middle course between them. This spirit of tolerance causes religious factions that have been making holy attempts to cut each other's throats on other continents, to live together, holding their religious services separately, but buying and selling, associating in political and other ways, and crossing the bloody line with intermarriages.
--written in 1897
Political organizers alone powerfully use the advantages of cooperation and coordination of popular forces for public purposes. Those who are unselfishly interested in the advancement of virtue and true prosperity have not yet learned to combine their large numbers and to pull together.
Is there a single trait, characteristic of the entire City, continuous through its history and dundamentally connected with its development? There is great philanthropy--in streaks; there is corruption--in places; there is old-time Americanism--in sections; there is Continental liberality--in spots all over; there is Puritanism--to match the LIberality; but the Spirit of Tolerance is New York's peculiar characteristic. This spirit operates in all affairs--busniness, social, religious, political--and proceeds from an unconscious but all-controlling realization of the duty of minding our own business and letting other people mind theirs.
Tolerance was essential to the development of the commerce for which New York has always been preeminent. It was the natural outgrowth of the commercial spirit. Even in the strained relations arising from the "excise question," when one class of citizens parades tableax of LIberty, in tears, surounded by the Muses weeping because they cannot have free beer on Sunday, and another class demands that the liquor business shall be entirely extirpated--between these two extremes stands the conservative mass of citizens, who manage to see some claims on each side, to tolerate both sections of extremists, and to provide a middle course between them. This spirit of tolerance causes religious factions that have been making holy attempts to cut each other's throats on other continents, to live together, holding their religious services separately, but buying and selling, associating in political and other ways, and crossing the bloody line with intermarriages.
--written in 1897
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