Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919). New York. 1906.
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| like one another. New York, however, never was really an English town, and its citizens always differed radically among themselves in morals, manners, and physical well-being, no less than in speech, blood, and creed. From time to time new ethnic elements have made their appearance, but the change has been not from one race to another, but from one mixture of races to another. |
| Of course there are very sharp points of contrast other than those of mere size and growth between colonial New York and the New York of the United States. The three leading religious denominations of the present United States had but small and scanty followings in colonial times. In New York, just prior to the Revolution, the Methodists and Baptists had but a small meeting-house apiece, and the handful of Catholics no recognized place of worship whatever; whereas at the present day the Methodists and Baptists form the two leading and characteristic denominations in the country districts of America, while Catholicism has forged to the front in the cities. |
| In eighteenth-century New York both the Quakers and Jews had places of worship. The Germans had one Lutheran and one Calvinistic Church; but the German pre-revolutionary immigrants did not produce many men of note, and their congregations remained small and unprogressive, their young men of spirit drifting off to |