"And, from its station in the hall,an ancient timepiece says to all,'Forever—never!Never—forever!'""Through days of sorrow and of mirth,Through days of death and days of birth,Through every swift vicissitudeOf changeful time, unchanged it has stood,And as if, like God, it all things saw,It calmly repeats those words of awe'Forever—never!Never—forever!'"
"And, from its station in the hall,an ancient timepiece says to all,'Forever—never!Never—forever!'"
"Through days of sorrow and of mirth,Through days of death and days of birth,Through every swift vicissitudeOf changeful time, unchanged it has stood,And as if, like God, it all things saw,It calmly repeats those words of awe'Forever—never!Never—forever!'"
It knew more than I did, and could point out the moon's changes, and the seasons, and the seconds.
What makes the place? Not any one man, nor any group of men, but the inner spirit of the city, what I will call the genius of community life, which gives that indefinable tone that marks the city from the town, and that when amplified belongs only to an industrial assemblage of people. I attributed her phenomenal individualism, first to her unpedestaled idol, Rev. Parsons Cook, D.D., who made so much of individual work and accountability, also to her antecedents and atmosphere in which men working alone developed the contemplative habits of shoemakers. As they kept thinking they kept having new ideas and they had them hard. Families dwelt apart. Nothing is so revolutionary as the development of apartment hotels, and particularly of a prodigious number of restaurants. Her social, charitable and benefit associations must have arisen in the years under review, from almost a negligible quantity to well-nigh half a thousand.
In the self-evolving life of the place there has been a strong trend toward associated life, which has reconditioned everything. It is without a parallel in the entire history of the community. Cities are themselves prominent waymarks in human history. Cincinnatus, when at his plow, was summoned by voices from the city. The tendency toward congregate life is witnessed by the enormous increase in the number of play-houses and in the attendance upon them. In an earlier day one stood for a time in solitary prominence and has become grandfather to a big brood. There has been an astounding increase in what I will call the department of service. If a person is on the street in the late afternoon when the matinees are over, and the women's clubs, and as well the errands and social visits, he will see another form of new, associated life, in the descent by hundreds, upon all the new delicatessen shops, and similar departments in stores where cooked and nicely prepared foods are kept for evening tables. If anything has seemed hungrier than these individuals, it has been the furnace during severe weather.
Because of increasing wealth and education and refinement, people put out their work more into laundries and bakeries and general mutual business concerns. This, like mercy, blesses him that gives and him that takes. If anything is to be inferred from the growth in co-operative housekeeping in the last generation it will come to some real good, complete result, surely, in the next decade. Speed the day. It is of course the solution in part of the servant girl question. What was once a luxury is now assumed to be a necessity. As things are going, men will soon refuse a mansion in the skies, unless luxuries are promised that our ancestors never heard of. We would expect great development in a rural community that is in the knee-pant period. As Cicero said, "Nothing is discovered and perfected at the same time." We do well, for every reason, to make much of what is so delightfully historic.
Even patriotism is grounded and rooted in the past. I like a certain relish there is in the place. The soul of it, too, suits my fancy. Things, there, were in some way pitched in the right key. It took New York a hundred and seventy-five years to gain its first thirty-three thousand inhabitants. While our industrial city has developed very much more rapidly, the unlikeness ceases, when it comes to the matter of crooked streets, which prevail also in Boston, but some one has said that he does not include Boston when he speaks of the United States. In the inspired volume we read of a street that was called Straight, but that term would not be applied to Pearl St. in New York, which hits Broadway twice. Mr. Ruskin tells us that there is not one straight line in nature.
Some newly revealed sources of wealth were uncovered, and the city received her crown. More new men with high grade mechanical skill came to be employed in the electric-light works than there were in Xenophon's famous army. A rare opportunity came and she did that which is rarely done. Some cities are famous for one thing. Kansas City for beef, Chicago for modesty, Hartford for insurance, Milwaukee for beer, Atlantic City for Board-walks, and Lynn for her new Boulevard to Nahant and Swampscott. After a North-Easter, particularly on a high full tide, when the spray is thrown over the tops of the telephone poles, the sight is exhilarating. There is education in contact with affairs. The place came to be the home of a capacious department-school of the mechanical arts, and of the latest and most popular of all the sciences. Her graduates filtered out into all the land. The situation was peculiar. There were sounds in the air like the cracking of the ice, at the incoming of spring, to prove to everybody that the Labor Movement was on the way unlike the ice which forms at the bottom and rises to the top. The Labor Movement was organized from the top downward, rather than from the bottom up. The reformers felt a disposition to criticize existing conditions. The custom prevailed of saying things derogatory to the place. Then came a rather general practice of habitually decrying one's town. Now there are two or three curious things about this habit of disliking one's own town. One of them is that this vice seems to coexist in human nature with even an intense degree of patriotism. Persons who are second to none in love of country are among those who will permit themselves to speak sneeringly of their particular town. Another amazing fact about this evil habit is its prevalence. Max O'Rell has noted that if you wish to hear some criticism of America you have only to go to Boston. Persons, who have ever lived in the country, are sure that their particular village is the worst place for gossip on the globe, and as if this were not dispraise enough, they will refer to their native towns as "dead and alive" places, or make some allusion to their having "gone to seed," or prove to you that the best families have moved elsewhere, or will apply the epithets "sleepy," "deserted," "God-forsaken," or else they will sum up their villifications in a single expression and style, for short, their native place as a "one-horse-town," and express thankfulness that there are so many roads by which any one can leave it. We all wish to be delivered from a man who so far from developing what I will call place-pride, does not speak well of his own folks. I know of a dog, that is said never to bark except at his own folks. The graduate of a college, on entering politics is often deprived of his rightful influence, by the popular feeling, that he feels called upon only to criticise. But the further peculiarity of the habit of which I am speaking is that it works on without discrimination. It involves some places that are entitled to exception.
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 ship 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 assemblies, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 entitled 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 shore 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.
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.
[1]Page 104.
[1]Page 104.
[2]See Harper's Cyclopedia, p. 390, and The Book of Berkshire, p. 30.
[2]See Harper's Cyclopedia, p. 390, and The Book of Berkshire, p. 30.
[3]See Cook's Centuries, p. 30.
[3]See Cook's Centuries, p. 30.