Revisiting the Earth Part 15

_Money in all Pockets_

I had heard that money talked, but in this place it walked. It went up and down the streets. I used to be amazed at the amount of money that was out of doors. The plenitude of money, especially among young people, astonished me. I had seen money after harvest, "When the s.h.i.+p comes in,"

but here the young men and women were paid every week, and seemed to have their money right where they could lay their hands upon it. I had come from a place where people were well clothed, but here, it was different, they were well dressed. There were no slums, no streets of squalor. No quarters given over to the submerged tenth, to the socially non-elect. There were a few improvident, impoverished or really unfortunate families. One philanthropist drew the line on helping any family that showed intemperance or kept a dog.

The Oratorio Society, the far-famed choirs, with a master of a.s.semblies, more than a captain, a host in himself developing enthusiasm in vocal music in the public schools, privately employed to visit Sunday-schools to get everybody to sing, not only had a great influence in the city, they had too much. They were exclusive, they smothered the lyceum, displaced the lecture, hushed elocution.

I used to complain publicly that the other arts did not get their hearing.

_The Wine of Sweet Remembrance_

As anyone who has lived in the past is expected to utter a wail that the former days were better than these, I will be true to type and say plainly that, nature being originally so profuse in her gifts, I greatly miss the glorious gardens of an earlier day. Blossom Street and Vine Street and Cherry Street tell, by their names, their own story: and the tall ranks of the dahlias and the color of the azaleas, still sometimes seen in miniature kindergartens, faintly indicate the early glories of the place.

In the good old times we had our sunken gardens. Their surface was often lower than the grade of the streets, and this low rich soil of deep alluvium had a perfect fury of productiveness.

So, too, in constructing their earliest House of Prayer, the oldest Congregational Church in the world[3] that stands on its original ground, for warmth, not having stoves, they adopted the policy, like the Germans, of digging themselves in, and laid the sills of their meeting-house three feet under ground. As they advanced they were children of fortune in the style and architecture of many of their public buildings.

[Footnote 3: See Cook's Centuries, p. 30.]

The City Hall, in the period in which it was built, at the close of the Civil War, was a gem. When I have seen some of the monstrosities worked off on some of our cities and towns, made hideous under the guise of architecture, with churches that in design seemed studied insults to the Deity, I have repeatedly told the builders the exact amount of the fare to this city where they could at least get their ideas up, obtain a vision and gain a conception of what a building might become.

_Ancientness is Falling Off_

I have attributed a remarkable escape, speaking broadly, from such deformities, such travesties on the grace of architecture, the least developed of the arts, that with pain we are forced to contemplate, to the fact that this city is conspicuously a place of the people and they will not stand for cranky, crazy fads and obsessions. At any hour for forty years, a stranger to fear, with absolute confidence I could point to buildings that it would be well enough to call perfect of their kind. Once it would have been tolerable at a great Public Fair to exhibit inventions, wares, and products under a rough shed; but public taste has so advanced that at a World's Fair nothing less than a palace meets the general expectation. On revisiting the earth, one awakens to the fact that business organizations have set out to have buildings that are not only commodious and suitable but they must be attractive and interesting.

The same fact is apparent in the evolution of railway architecture when buildings must be pleasing as well as useful.

"_Stray Historical Facts Corralled_"

This city did not happen. She adopted the policy of faith, and made others believe in her because she believed in herself. She has attended strictly to business, and has come to hold twice as many people as the fourth largest state in the Union. In point of population, she is as much ent.i.tled to an exclusive Congressman and to two United States Senators as a state that is larger than New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland combined. Or to use a better measure, she exceeds in population one of the states that would overlay all New England. For my work, no better place could have been found beneath the all-beholding sun than this fair, expansive city, on its crescent bay, with its sh.o.r.e drive where the Indians once held their running matches, which has now become one of the boulevards of the world. Like the apple trees in an old New England orchard, the men were marked by individuality. They were fruitful, needed, prized, each had a place, but they were so different in the way they stood up. There were active men, gifted in speech, who had the training that came out of the old Lyceum and the Silsbee Street Debating Society. Oxford Street Chapel, the home of a sort of free-for-all religion, became a general receiver for all these organizations and for reformatory work generally and eloquence was dog-cheap. I have no doubt that many of these men are dead, but they are alive to me. I see them as of old. To me they live in the same houses and have the same peculiarities, and carry, on them, the same years that they then wore.

_The By-products of Development_

As I had been mixed up for some time with a professional set, I used to sit in mute surprise to see such men, knowing the value of things, with practised minds, devoting themselves to business life rather than the old time professions, to the arts rather than to the sciences. Some of these men had mental endowment enough to be physicians or Judges in Court, but they devoted their fine minds to manufacturing. Some of them, undoubtedly of great ability, did not deem themselves too good for business or for the world. Men speak of conducting a business, but you can not conduct a thing that is not moving, any more than a pilot can steer a boat that is lying still, although I suppose it is possible to conduct a vehicle when it is headed for the cemetery. They were just suited to the times, and to the place, and to the task, and each one seemed to contribute an individual part in making the city the world's great shoe centre. Some men were strong at home, others were good advertisers and solicitors and did work in the field from which all the manufacturers benefited, whose manner of life need not be changed if the Millennium had already come. For straight-forward, right-minded, high-principled men, who keep their word, and keep the faith, I am bold enough to invite the test, laid down in the inspired volume, which the great patriarch met with such intense concern. First came the overture that disaster should be averted from an imperiled city if fifty creditable men should be found in it. He felt some misgiving about finding fifty and entreated that the number be reduced to forty-five and then that he be answerable for finding only forty, then thirty, then twenty, then ten. I believe that if any one there were answering for that place during the Golden Age, he could not only begin with the smallest required number, ten, but that he could go up through the schedule and find twenty, thirty, forty, forty-five, and fifty.