importance of preserving contemporary records as the data from which all future history must receive its true impress. When this Society was formed, but one institution of its kind existed in America—that of the Massachusetts Historical Society. It occupied a room in the City Hall from 1804 to 1809. Its first president was Judge Egbert Benson; its first vice-presidents were Bishop Moore and Judge Brockholst Livingston, and nearly all its presidents and many of its vice-presidents have since been men of national reputation.
The Merchants' Exchange, in Wall Street, was completed in 1827, and the city Post Office was quartered under its roof. The full-page illustration is from a steel engraving published in the New York Mirror in 1832, a little more than half a century ago—the artist looking towards the East River, with the Phoenix Bank on his right and the Winthrop and Wilkes homesteads on his left. A writer of same date mournfully moralizes over the "wonderful mutations and alterations within the course of a century," saying: "This is the street which contains most of the floating capital of the city; and indeed there is little specie to be found anywhere else. This is the mart for bankers, brokers, underwriters, and stock-jobbers. Here are planned and consummated speculations of every shape, character, color, and dimension—from the sale of an orange to the disposal of an East Indian cargo. This is the street, before any other in the city, for speculations, not merely in commercial affairs, but on the characters, manners, and pursuits of those who are thus occupied. This is the street which Halleck has not only hallowed by his lyre, but also by his own commercial labors. For, however it may astonish the reader, poets are not always in the clouds. The day has gone by when genius banqueted on air. That we are correct, take his own words:
My thoughts recline—
I'm busy in the cotton trade,
And sugar line! '
And:
For I'm a poet, and bank notes to me
Are curiosities, as closely eyed
Whene'er I get them as a stone would be
Tossed from the moon,' etc., etc."
