ABSTRACT
The urbanization of America entered a new stage in the 1860s, one in which the reorganization and reconstruction of old cities overshadowed the continued development of new towns. New York’s wage-earners have no other place to live, more is the pity. They are truly poor for having no better homes; waxing poorer in purse as the exorbitant rents to which they are tied, as ever was serf to soil, keep rising. From the end of the eighteenth century the State and (somewhat later) the city of New York were, more perhaps than any other State or city, the seat of intrigues and the battle-ground of factions. Among the political organizations of New York the oldest and most powerful was the Tammany Society. The percentage of persons who were practically foreigners was and is of course much greater, because it includes many of the sons born in the United States of persons still imperfectly Americanized.
