Swearing has grown milder. The grossness and blasphemy are largely barred, while the expletives that technically may not be swearing at all, being used for raciness, vigor and emphasis, have increased one hundred fold.
A symptom of decadence is the elimination of book-stores. Speaking broadly it is impossible to find a stall with a stock of books except in the larger cities. When desirous of substantial reading matter I am sometimes able to buy biographies and other books, worth while, at the drug store in a country town. On moving into flats, families commit an unpardonable sin in disposing of their books. The most sickening sight in New York, Chicago, or Boston is to see second-hand books faded and weather-beaten exposed on the street for sale at a seedy, feeble price.
In spite of the strong drift of governments toward democracy, in revisiting the earth, I detected an exaggeration of class feeling as compared with the early days when there were no poor in the whole town and hardly any very rich. Our pleasures were then more simple and our life, on the whole, more serious.
The increased height in houses is apparent. As the family prospers, it seeks to have the walls in the second story carried up full height, that they may not show inside the pitch of the roof which is the distinguishing mark of a cottage.
I suppose that the passing years make little or no impression on a well-built stone wall, but where growth and prosperity abound they are not likely to preserve many of the primitive buildings and land-marks, but if any living man had predicted the entire remaking and reshaping of this place of my early residence the reply would have been that if the Lord would work a miracle then might this thing be. The man who professed to know just how we are made, as an automobile maker knows a car, tells us that in seven years we get, physically, a brand new outfit, that old things pass away, and all things become new. As we have not now the same bodies so we have not the same mind. Our ideals, our manners are different. We are different. We have had many a re-birth. Time has brought changes that could no more be withstood than you could resist the earth in its revolution. It is the miracle of a generation, which to relate, were not a history but a piece of poetry, and would sound to many ears like a fable. The growth in population and in wealth, during a long constructive period, has kept up the clatter of the hammer, the cry of "mort," and the scent of the resinous odor of the pine. Inventions and improvements have placed man in a new relation to the globe he inhabits. Since new ideas began to prevail former methods have been discarded. Even a snake, with years, sheds its scales and envelopes itself in a new skin. The sun once stood still, and the Jordan was arrested in its banks, but life and the stream of events have flowed on without pause or rest. People who have never made a visit, like ours, will talk freely, far from wisely, about what they have always said, and always thought, as if they had always looked through the same eyes, and judged by the same standards. Not so. You looked on life as it seemed then and are looking again with the picture shifted. Your whole point of view is changed. When a man says, "I have always felt," he means that he has felt thus, back part way, or to a given point, but not so certainly much beyond it.
We made from recollection and were aided by inquiry, a catalogue of the false prophets who early moved away, to the big cities, saying that the place where we had lived would never increase much in business or population. There is a French proverb which warns people not to use the words "never or always." The Wall Street Journal has just used that unreliable forbidden word "never." It heads an article, "Cheap Food Never Again." Any man living in our old place of residence would be wary of the use of the term "never." He would feel that almost any good fortune may come. With tractors and gang-plows operating in the Land of the Dakotas, South Dakota alone being a quarter larger than all New England, and Montana, the third largest state in the union, very much more than equal in size to England, Scotland, Ireland combined and Texas as big as Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, and Switzerland together, these states being now chiefly unfarmed, with shoals of immigrants after the war to work these fields, bounded only by the sky line, how can a man use the expression, Cheap Food Never Again? The statesman Cambon said that never would Rome cease to belong to the people and that never would Rome be the capital of the king of Italy. A Clergyman here, of high authority and position, showed how all the sovereigns of the chief European nations were blood relatives and announced that there could never be another great war. He became positive. He said such a thing was unthinkable. Look next at the harvest of death in the German war. "He who, outside of mathematics, pronounces the word 'impossible' lacks prudence."
Yankee Doodle's criticism was quite just. He could not see the town because there were so many houses. We need to get away from the crowded streets and narrow lanes and talkative people to win a true perspective. I wanted to sit down alone and think things over. The people, generally, were as strange to me as I was to them, and yet there was a time, when I was as well-known to everybody, as a child is to his own mother, and when I knew everybody in town. All the alterations of things are wondrously complete, but these were nothing to the change of appearance in the faces of the people. The old familiar countenances, where were they? I looked here and I looked there and everywhere but they had largely vanished from above and below the earth. The character of the dog has undergone less change, than that of the human master, to whom he is so strangely attached. Change, that immutable law of nature, had wrought such shifts in the faces among old acquaintances that all smiles of recognition were wanting. But when I look in the glass I see no change. To the people I must have appeared as the veriest Rip Van Winkle. It was not the fault of the thrifty, prosperous place that I had slept so long, but like Rip Van Winkle it was in me to come back, and I am trying to learn to say with him, Everything is changed and I am changed. He recalled the occurrences before he entered upon his extended slumber and returned to find that the place was altered. It was enlarged and more populous and had rows of houses which he had not seen before. The dress of the people, too, was of a different fashion from that to which he was accustomed but whether under the somnolent influences of his lethargies, or free from them, he mused amid all the changes of outward affairs upon one immutable scene, "the lordly river moving on its silent but majestic course."
On revisiting the earth nothing is more remarkable than to find that with each man goes one striking characterization. There is usually one prevalent well-founded recollection based upon a temperamental peculiarity, and the impression was made, that the former citizen was fortunate to leave that one item in the memory of the people. You make reference to him, "Oh, yes, he was our town clerk for twenty years." As often as you mention him you are told again the fact which distinguishes him. One beloved character was Abiel Bassett. "Oh yes, he was our good deacon, Deacon Bassett." He was a farmer. As such, he made his living, but that was nothing to the point. "Deacon Bassett"—that was all. Cain stands in the catechism for one fact. There are two things beside, that could be said of him. It is not usual to mention them. Judas must have had excellent qualities or he would not have been made an apostle. One thing attaches to him. If a person's picture is to be taken he might like to designate the occasion and expression, but then he might show self-consciousness which spoils everything. He must not appear to want "to be seen of men." History wants to make his picture a likeness, just as he is, and as his friends see him, every day. On revisiting the earth I find that one act is always stated of my father. It gave him earthly immortality. It was not his greatest act nor his best. He took no pose for the permanent picture. Joseph Jefferson, Kate Claxton and Edwin Booth had, each of them, one part that fitted them like a garment and fully expressed them. It would inevitably become the favorite selected for a "Benefit Night." Audiences in part determined their public character. My father took his permanent position thus by a kind of election.
He was not consulted. History does not say, "How would you like to have your picture taken now?" He is caught like a fly in the amber and there he remains. His repute is imperishable. Thus statuesque is history.
My mother left one clear-cut impression. It remained like the imprint of a fern leaf on a rock, a suggestive though accidental record of the years gone by. It was a simple picture stamped with a strange indelibility, like the patience of Job, the meekness of Moses, the daring of Daniel, the greed of Shylock, the indecision of Hamlet, the jealousy of Othello, the furious driving of Jehu. One story was told with endless iteration by the old-time neighbors who feel themselves under no obligation to laboriously dig up a second story when the usual one is the best and is so thoroughly characteristic. Thus all other occurrences are suffered to fade from the community's recollection. When a patriarch was returning from battle with his spoils, a priest, meeting him, stretched forth his arms and blessed him. In this pose history's snap-shot was taken. After thousands of years we find that he "abideth a priest continually." Such men are the moral pivots of society. Their claim on remembrance, like William the Silent, Charles the Bold, Richard the Lion-Hearted turned upon one conspicuous thing and history will so nail that one fact down and so hammer it that it is practically impossible to effect a readjustment, as in the matter of Daniel Webster's physical condition while making his Rochester speech and of the obloquy cast upon Chief Justice Taney in the Dred-Scott decision, that the negro "had no rights that the white man was bound to respect." The learned judge never made that affirmation. His sympathies in the recital were against, rather than with, the sentiment he named. In revisiting the earth you find that history did not fasten upon the best form of characterization and you try to argue. Oh never mind now, our story is a good one; it will have to stand. It has been attacked before.
The difficulty has been pointed out of recalling our childhood, exactly as it was, for the reason that as we travel backward, we take our present selves with us. Imagination is now less active, and so things are shorn of their size and of their exaggerated features. On coming to town we miss the lion of the place. Our juvenile Hall of Fame was featured by the Sagamore of the tribe. In the good old days society had its leader, its model, its dictator who would have led an army or governed a kingdom. He merited the description by which the Norse sages so often carried a meaning of high praise when they declared one to be "not an every-day man." His individual life was less lost in the crowd. His isolation reacted on his character. His residence was one of the show places of the town. It was the resort for the itinerant politician, holding out the glad hand, who was to speak in the evening, and was with us to electioneer. In such a community it falls usually to one and the self-same family to entertain. The house is known as the Quaker tavern, or the Methodist tavern. Its hospitality is proverbial. It had its spare room. This became locally quite famous for the celebrities it had welcomed, before they had come to their later fame. Hospitality in this form is the grace of small, remote, detached places. The minister's house had a prophet's chamber, with a "bed and a table and a stool and a candle-stick" so that when any "holy man of God" passed by he could turn in thither. A minister's wife said plaintively that she never knew how many she was cooking a meal for. On one occasion she had provided a custard pie, more than ample, for the few she then had in mind. It was however necessary later to cut it into six pieces and that, notwithstanding the fact that it was imperative, by an unforseen situation, for the mother herself and her daughter not to "care for any" that day. The minister's family adopted a code of S. O. S. signals which it would sound around F. H. B., "Family hold back," M. I. K., "more in the kitchen." To the manse any minister, though a total stranger and unannounced, could come with complete assurance. The itinerant and his horse were now and then forced by a snow-storm to remain a few days until the roads were broken up and settled.
The lobby, in the earlier country tavern, was universally called the bar-room. Travel was thus staging from one bar-room to another. The tables were served by the village belles. Other employment, as in factories or stores, did not then exist. The inn holder was a conspicuous man. He picked up the news from the stage driver and his passengers. When the old-fashioned Concord stage coach approached town the four fine horses were slowed down into an easy pace for a few furlongs but reaching the suburbs, the horses were given the word, and the long whip was cracked and they dashed into town, making the arrival peculiarly enlivening.
Presently the country landlord would appear on the long broad platform to sound the summons to the table. This was done by the loud violent ringing of a dinner bell, which was swung by a whole arm-movement on both sides of the artist's body, and made to publish in double tones its noisy welcome. The ringer's whole anatomy entered for the time being into the contortion for producing sound.
Every institution is said to be the lengthened shadow of some personality. It was a happy thought that gave those men the title of fathers of their country. The term is very significant of their munificence or of some real thing that made them kings in the hearts of men. Those names are enshrined in some academy, or other school, or bank, or business house, or attached to some central conspicuous street. A return to the residence discovers that imagination had given it a part of its size and that its proportions were carried over from the local prominence of its occupant. "I saw an angel standing in the sun," said St. John. Position gives size. A man who stands near a camp fire projects portentous dimensions on space behind him. The aristocracy of such a man sometimes was certainly not in his dress. He wore the old-fashions, walked in the old ways, and was a revelation of things that had passed away. He wore a heavy, tall, silk cylinder hat in which he carried a bandana handkerchief, valuable papers, and a large pocket-book that was wrapped round with a thin band of leather that was passed under a succession of loops. We used to call him a gentleman of the old school. We used to secretly wonder how he escaped the flood.
When he adopted his style of dress his apparel was the last word in fashion. It suited his taste, was becoming, comfortable, and satisfactory. His course was consistent. He adhered to it and kept right on. Toward the last of his career he depended somewhat upon it to make him a marked man. Such an individual with obsolete manners was, like Melrose Abbey, impressive in its decay. In his age, disliking changes, his distrustful mind would cling to what was nearest to him, his appearance. He did not see why his style of dress should be interfered with. He made no reckoning with time. That item alone gives a rude awakening to a recruit. In a call for troops he was passed by. Again in a call for troops he is summoned. He is substantially what he felt himself before to be, only time, simply time has passed and he is twenty-one and takes a new relation to his own parents and to his country and to his fortune. The city of Washington used to contain a set of pensioned admirals, retired army officers and officials, who still wore the hall marks of their life when at its climax. The simple revolution of the earth made them fossils and relics and reminders that the procession of which they had been honored members had now for the greater part turned the corner and passed out of view. Sometimes an old man and his wife, tall and antique in appearance, resembling Abraham and Sarah of old, are distinguished chiefly for looking "like the afternoon shadow of other people."
On revisiting the earth the old albums are the first things inevitably brought out and was there ever anything more grotesque and unearthly than that which is shown in their hideous, faded contents? A woman, in those days, so deformed her fine form, that the wonder was expressed, and the surprise, that with that make-up she ever got a husband.
When de Tocqueville was in this country looking for evidences of democracy in America, he frankly states in the introduction to his epoch-making book that he saw more than there was. Impossible. You cannot find what does not exist, yet his untruth is the exact unqualified truth. He that seeketh findeth. He plainly saw signs of democracy before he left the company's dock as he landed from the ship. He saw it too at the hotel. It takes a big volume to tell all the tokens he discovered. If he had been accompanied by a twin brother, different in heart, in sympathies, and in his specialty he could in turn have found money kings, railroad kings, kings of fortune, landlords, laborers in a stand-up fight with capitalists. McAllister found a social set limited in number to four hundred. A real estate man takes a different view of the Hawthorne house or of Independence Hall or the Old South Church from the antiquarian. Dr. W. J. Dawson knew a man who sailed with Napoleon but could tell of him later but two items, one of which had some reference to silk hosiery, that his mind probably revolted at, as extravagant or as prudish. Of the same incident, some said it thundered, others said an angel spake. An artist and a banker traveled together abroad and on hearing their recital you would suppose they visited different lands.
One of the curiosities of history was the great game of follow-my-leader, that the whole community used to play. Under the hat of the great man of the village was a brain large enough for the ruler of a nation. He seemed the peer of a Bismarck in executive force. We have had since a high grade of general education but then we had a giant. He had an individuality peculiar and surprising. His mental traits were exceptional. The dominant features of his character were energy, industry, and courage. He was an able, genial, hard-working man, a treasure and a blessing, but giving some evidence of rusty mental machinery and of being belated in the world's history and of absolute inability to train a successor. A modern, typical exhibition of the relation of the big man to the town was given at Three Oaks, Michigan, when Admiral Dewey gave a cannon to the committee that after the Spanish war was arranging a memorial to the dead soldiers and sailors. It was offered to the city that in proportion to its population would make the largest contribution to the monument. Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco all vied with each other. The case turned on the clear swung conception of one master mind. It would never be possible, Mr. E. K. Warren observed, "to rouse all the inhabitants of a large city to give to such a cause," but every man, woman and child in Three Oaks would give a dime or a dollar on condition that he himself gave a thousand times the amount. The people owe a debt of gratitude to such a man, a marked individual specimen of human worth, with a character of his own, who plays the part of fountain to their reservoir. There is a fine reflex influence in being what the New Testament calls "a lover of good men." There is nothing better that can enter the human soul than admiration and reverence for high character. They are the crown of our moral nature. One element in them is appreciation. It was a fine training for boys to show and feel deference. This is one thing that a boy does not bring into the world with him. It is not natural to look up.
We live in an age of interrogation when all things are questioned, not only as to their right to exist, but particularly as to their right in any degree to rule. Every age has its own lesson and adds its own peculiar gift to those preceding it. Are we better or worse? This only I know that these men were beacon lights to the young, illuminating their path and beckoning them on, and deserve to be enshrined in a perpetual and revered remembrance. From all this there has come a reaction. Congressmen and legislators have not lowered in grade, far from that, as the elimination of the bar from the capital would be one of many evidences, but the public intelligence has risen so that they, relatively, seem to have descended. Instead of a century plant the usual attraction now is a garden. A great social revival has been abroad; the people are getting together. There is now more concerted action. In the business world individuals are forming alliances. Interests are being confederated. As the community spirit comes to consciousness the individuality of men diminishes. Society forms into clubs, chambers of commerce, and into boards of directors in which men are less marked individually and much, even of their personality, is concealed by the extravagant multiplication of societies and institutions and meetings of every kind. The churches have pretty nearly lost the individual, since the introduction of team work, itself a blessing, but the individual has withered. He is leveled down and smoothed out by the necessity of acting only in conjunction with groups.
The Arabian Nights would make queer history, yet they would prove a wet fuse and fail to kindle the mind if they did not suggest actual experience. Who is your "old man" that sticks to your shoulders putting you in Sinbad's class? Each village carries its unconventional character. He gives a touch of color to the place. Rip Van Winkle, an old drunkard, who slept for twenty years in the Catskills was a great favorite with the children. They would shout for joy whenever he approached. He assisted at their sports, made their playthings, and taught them to fly kites. He was surrounded by a troop of them. He had a distinct individuality. He was a hero, with all his characteristics well marked. A person on revisiting the earth misses such a striking familiar figure in the neighborhood. We saw Mrs. Van Winkle beat up old Rip with a broom-stick, but although she was a clean, tidy, thrifty person who kept her house swept and garnished in spite of her improvident husband, in the estimation of the boys she was not to her well-known husband a companion character.
"Jack Sprat could eat no fatHis wife could eat no lean."
"Jack Sprat could eat no fatHis wife could eat no lean."
Young eyes are sharply drawn to persons so dissimilar in their tastes. Children are quick to see that this very difference in taste produced a peculiar situation. Our early life is peopled with distinctive and marked characters and they have gone along with us through life. It is the peculiar outstanding people that, like a burr, stick to the memory.
It is a matter of common knowledge that Washington at the time of his death was the richest man in the country. All are familiar with the fact that he acquired property through his brother Lawrence, and the widow Custis whom he married, but less attention is given to the suggestive fact that he invested widely in land in what was then the West. We have letters to his agents. Judson destroyed all his own letters and papers touching private matters, but there they are, in Washington's case, and he who runs may read. He had been a surveyor. He knew a good thing when he saw it. His invariable rule was to buy quality. Showing the same wisdom he did in his campaigns and his farewell address, which has never lost its influence, he turned to the West to do his buying. Entirely aside from the Revolution, if Washington had not been a great general, he was well started on lines that would have made him a very substantial citizen. The confidence he expressed in the West is believed to be, and has been stated to be, a higher monument to his fame than the metal-tipped, slender, tapering sky-pointing and heaven-reaching obelisk reared in his honor near the banks of the Potomac. He was invited to visit France but could not, he said, bring his affairs into a state of order, during the remainder of his life, and the matters that most needed his care were his large purchases of land in the West which now, with some little contiguous territory are worth Twenty Million Dollars. Washington remains our richest president not only relatively but absolutely.
We find him making a sixth journey to see his lands which were located on the right and left banks of the river, and bounded thereby, forty-eight miles and a half. This portrayal makes very obvious what is implied when it is said of an individual that he is not a good business man. He simply lacks what Washington had, intensity of interest in his affairs, energy of mind, promptness. We do not say foresight, there is no such thing as foresight, we mean insight, good judgment, and a fine knowledge of the trend of things, a perception of the direction taken by popular movements. Washington was accused of being close-fisted, but some one takes the ground that a man must close his fist if there is something in it that others were seeking by illegitimate means to get. At his death he was worth a half million dollars, and four hundred thousand dollars of it lay in western lands. "Would God we may have wisdom to improve the opportunity," a prayer in which many persons who have had much better chances than ever came to him, pressed as he was with patriotic service, wished they had joined, but who allowed opportunity to knock at the door and turn away, unwelcomed. What a sight to Washington, now revisiting the earth, would a night view of Pittsburgh be with her deep fires and the lid off. Washington's insight was apparent by locating his purchases near the possibilities of a city whose tonnage exceeds that of any other city of the Union, whose vast manufacturing interests send up volumes of smoke that become a pillar of cloud by day and whose furnaces are pillars of fire by night, to lead the people on to prosperity and success. The mind has less influence on the will than many persons suppose. A man may know a fact and then do nothing about it. A lazy man may know the advantage of wealth and yet be without the motive to attain it. It is often a poor boy who has felt poverty and has some feeling about it that makes success with him a passion. He who hesitates is lost. It was the plunge of Curtius that saved Rome.
That great orator of nature to whom school-boys are so much indebted for energetic, passionate, effective declamations, Patrick Henry, father of fifteen children, made his widow and eleven surviving children rich by his early judicious purchases, like Washington, of lands. This much needs to be said, lest fortune be thought of as a blind goddess. A man that once was cutting grass and herding cattle earning his bread by the sweat of his brow is now Prince Fortunatus. No chance luck about it, for the opportunity that beckoned him called to others but their ears were dull of hearing. All of us, who are interested in vital reforms, must have been attracted to the career of Gerrit Smith, who gave thirty thousand dollars to destitute old maids and widows in the state of New York. No public subscription lacked his name, and he always gave away $50,000.00 and not seldom $100,000.00 each year. In his business life of fifty-six years he gave away $8,000,000.00 and left an estate of more than a million dollars. Such a recital, as in the case of Washington, makes us curious to find the sources of such philanthropy. We find that with rare acumen he developed the business of his father, who when a poor youth, kept a small store and traded for furs at first hands with the Indians. When his partner Mr. Astor bought real estate in New York city, the elder Smith purchased sixty thousand acres of land in the central part of the state of New York, of which enough was sold at auction to repay the purchase price and still leave enough to make him the largest landholder in the state. Subsequent additions made him the owner of more acres than any other man in the Union. Such a preparative study as this gave me intensest interest, when revisiting the earth, in treading the beautiful field, my birthplace, that my father bought in Iowa at the Government price of a dollar and a quarter an acre, that has since been sold at $205.00 an acre and the price paid for it at the last sale of it was $300.00 an acre and the buyer was offered $3,000.00 for his bargain. It is the percentage of gain that tells the story. It seems like the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
Besides learning these items and handling the papers that confirmed them, out came a fact that took my breath away. Once men profited by nature's bounty. To him that hath is given. That is the common way. Now comes the uncommon thing. From him that hath not is (not) taken away even that he hath. The sun and stars now look down upon a changed condition. The wildest dream has come true, a by-product of the war. It is one of the many things begun under circumstances which the German treaty-breakers, the disturbers of the peace, thrust upon us, a thing designed to aid agriculturists to feed our armies and allies, which, with the war over, will never be abated. We raise our eyes, and see a moneyed millennium coming down a common country road. It is in the form of an original system of rural credits. The Treasury Department of the United States has inaugurated a Federal Farm-Loan Bureau. Its outstanding feature is, if a borrower of a large amount pays his interest, he never hears again of the debt. Interest at six and a half per cent not only takes care of that item, but it pays it off, in less than a generation, also the money borrowed. A farmer at the start requires money for buildings, machinery, and herds. The aching heart of many a widow bereft of her home by the foreclosure of a mortgage on her property will see the deep significance in the sacrament that I am seeking to describe. The process is called amortization. The syllable "mort" as in "mortal," means death of the debt. From the first the mortgage is struck with death.
So happy to all concerned is this method, resembling a co-operative bank, of obtaining a greatly needed working capital that we may well rejoice with a large class of deserving people, who for the first time have the means of doing a larger, more profitable business, with the sting and hazard graciously removed. With what bitterness we have all heard the children of the poor recite the anguish that came into the home when the mortgage, like the naked sword suspended by a hair over the head of Damocles, came to do its dreaded office! "But the children began to be sorely weary," says Bunyan, "and they cried out unto Him that loveth pilgrims to make their way more comfortable." We have come to see the Government make the way of the children who inherit a mortgage more comfortable. All's well! You have no trouble with the interest. Only go on as you have been going. The farm, the home, are all yours. The mortgage is dead.
A day on a real farm did not have a dull moment in it. It was not only full of incident and instruction but as compared with a generation ago it was different. Immediately a very young calf was noticed that, to use the farmer's unexpected phrase, his mother does not "claim." I supposed he would say that his mother would not "own." The cow was put in a stall, in a barn, the calf being nourished and thus openly adopted by the mother they became effusively chummy. At first the cow "did not care" for the calf. When care began a noticeable regard commenced.
More curious still it seemed to find that in breaking out of a pasture the cattle were led by one member of the herd. The community of cattle would be quiet and contented except for one breaching individual. Here again I went to school to a farmer in the use of words. In his reference to this creature he designated the trouble maker as an "outlaw." I had not thought of applying that word to cattle.
I stood still and wondered at the constant and varied use of the voice by a farmer as he moves about among the creatures that he owns. Armed with a whip, like an Irishman with his shillalah at a fair, I supposed he would keep it flourishing about his head and that he would be accompanied by a dog. An owner will not trust his cattle to the care of a man that employs a shepherd dog. Cattle must be kept quiet. A dog wakes them all up and sets back the gain that they would make for the day. Farmers and drovers are whistling, singing, calling, shouting, talking, all the time to their creatures and they like it.
It is everywhere, I suppose, well known that the western spirit has always been less tolerant of an outlaw than the people of the East are. I asked the ranch man what course he took with an outlaw among cattle. "As soon as I detect him I get rid of him, not stopping at anything to do it." On the fourth of July I went out upon the piazza of the hotel, and looking up the street I saw a man, hung in effigy, upon a telephone pole in front of his own store, with his name placarded upon the suspended figure, that it should not be a case of mistaken identity. He had offended the decencies of life. The townspeople waited for a day or two to see if the authorities took it up. There was nothing doing. Then the citizens made public what they thought of the outlaw.
It seems that Schopenhauer had a gold piece which he used to put beside his plate at the table where he ate, surrounded by the young officers of the German army, and which was to be given to the poor, the first time he heard any conversation that was not about promotion or women. If this experiment were tried one's contribution to charity would not be large, provided the subjects were changed in the various well known localities. In the time of the great inflation in Chicago when any one could make his fortune by simply buying building sites and selling out before the ink had dried with which the first transfer was recorded, the subject discussed in hotels and offices would be Corner Lots.
These locations were sold and resold, each time at a large advance on the former price, and became the inexhaustible topic of conversation. Everybody was growing rich on paper and The City of the Lakes was the Mecca of speculators, a genuine Eldorado, where affluence was made easy, and first lessons in finance were given. The original gold coin was staked amid specific well understood surroundings. When environment changes topics change. In one town all the talk is money, money. At a public table in some localities where once it was all horse talk, in one corner of the dining room, the interchange of mind is on the speed of automobiles, the improvement made in cars since two years ago, the amount of gasoline to the mile, and the comparative excellence of the different manufactures.
In revisiting the earth on coming into close relations with each town, I found it had its distinctive atmosphere. The value of land did not depend upon the soil nor upon the climatic conditions so much as upon the human equation. Two communities upon the same railway with like physical conditions will find themselves growing apart. One place might have slightly inferior outward conditions. These are speedily overcome. Watch it grow.
In this garden of the earth one quickly loses his heart to Los Angeles. Her hotels are the last word in luxury. Thousands of citizens having become rich in Iowa spend their money in this Land of the Afternoon. While they have found California about as nature made it, besides the elements of the air and soil, Los Angeles has an atmosphere that is purely social. It is an attractive place to live, choice people have assembled there, and so, under pleasant conditions, others are drawn. The money in Pasadena never came out of the soil contiguous to the place. A man buying land saw how things were tending and the neighborhood in which he was going and said to the driver that he need not go any farther. The lay of the land and quality would make no difference. The atmosphere was alien and he was through. In the same state you find towns that are as unlike as if they stood on different continents. In San Francisco, all unannounced, you, on crossing a street, pass an equatorial, invisible line into the Chinese quarter which, in atmosphere, is five thousand miles away. There is in Paris an activity, a rapidity of movement that you do not find in Holland or in England. The people walk faster, talk faster, eat faster, ride faster, and live faster in all respects than do their neighbors. The English love the past and protest against the removal of the ancient land-marks, while the French love innovation. The atmosphere of the city of Washington, not being like most national capitals, a center of trade, is world-wide from that of Chicago. So much is it out of the popular drift that while a state was voting over-whelmingly for constitutional prohibition the measure was discountenanced by both of its senators. One atmosphere has in it a kind of vitalizing life, a perpetual marvel and a perpetual delight, reviving every faculty and affection, while in another the doctors administer quinine to the saffron-colored sojourners in its fever-haunted marshes.
Every region has its peculiar fitness for some particular kind of growth, Missouri apples, Michigan peaches, California oranges, Kentucky blue-grass, Wisconsin clover. To the south and west is the corn belt. Specific well-known places are best adapted to the varied form of animal life. The three northern continents are temperate; the three southern continents are tropical. In these warmest regions nature displays its fullest energy, its greatest diversity, its richest colors, and development. The animal kingdom grows in strength and perfection in this privileged zone, yet man presents his purest and most perfect type at the center of the temperate continents. At the base of the Himalayas vegetation is of a tropical character; at an elevation of five thousand feet European plants succeed. Wheat grows at an elevation of thirteen thousand feet, barley at fifteen thousand. We do not look for the best trees on the bleak mountain top but in the genial valley. As we go up the struggle for existence increases until even the sturdiest fail to thrive above the "timber line." Number one wheat can be produced only in localities where the summers are short and the winters long and cold. Corn is capable of the widest cultivation, but even that has its northern and southern limits. Climate is nature's smile and goes with the land. No man can farm against the climate and no medication can do for an invalid what the half-tropical sunshine will do in an oasis city. There is no more fascinating study than that of the sustaining, producing, and modifying effects of atmosphere.
It enhances our interest as we return to breathe again the air that made us ourselves as distinguished from others. We have known well our own standards, our ideals, our resolves, but how came we with what we find ourselves possessed. It adds interest to the old temples to visit the quarries which furnish them forth. In revisiting the earth it thrills us to look at the rock whence we were hewn. Our temptations were those peculiar to that locality. What I know about temptation is entirely different from what a remote stranger would guess. Our struggles were such as that environment occasioned and are not appreciated by persons in a different zone. Each soul has its own climate. Even man's sight responds to his environment. On watch, day in, day out, on a sailing vessel, scanning the distant horizon, the eye, becoming adapted to it, is far-sighted. It can hardly read fine print held close to the person. Even children brought up at the seaside and accustomed to far sights have to patiently await a readjustment of their vision. I can now trace, in my being, some reflex effect of each set of surroundings, in which for a term of years, I was placed. My experience in a new environment amounted to a re-birth. One educator considers the proximity of a mountain, worth at least to the student, one endowed professorship. "Let no one say he has written my life," said Walpole. "He has not the needful information. He never knew the crowd of little things which went to make my individual being and career. No one knows them but myself." One's interruptions and trials and crises and providences come with such surroundings as he then has and it is a striking experience, when revisiting the earth, to discover for one's self the agencies and influences by which he was moulded.
It is said that at Florence there is a circular hall, faced with separate mirrors. In the center is a statue of exquisite beauty. Each of these mirrors reflects the image of the statue at different angles, and consequently exhibits some particular point more prominently and accurately than any of the others. Artists study the statue through these mirrors, and thus can estimate the beauty of each separate part, and form a better judgment of the perfection of the whole. Let me show you, gentle reader, how you will get the truest conception of yourself. If you please, stand for a moment in this hall. In each mirror you will see yourself in the most impressionable period in your life. There is a reflection at the moment your destiny beckoned you, when you were in the act of getting hold of yourself and without ceremony began your career, seeming to yourself to be like Saul, who "went to seek his father's asses and found a kingdom."
As in water face answers to face so, in one angle of a mirror you recognize a first-rate likeness of yourself as you sat for the first time under your own vine and fig tree, remembering this long after as though you had seen a great sight. Like St. John you turned to see the voice that spake to you. Its last cadence may die in the air but it leaves an impression that will never fade.
These looking-glasses show your figure, life-sized, standing on a corner. Emergency met you. It really proved a providential interposition, and now these fortunate interventions mark the period in your life more than the days and months and years, and they were accompanied by an interior guidance, more distinctly discerned now, than it was felt at the time. There is none so homely but loves a looking-glass; however little or much a man is favored in looks he notices reflections made of himself, particularly if question is raised touching his appearance as viewed by his critics. In his autobiography Mr. Seward records that no matter what care and diligence we exercise and whatever be a man's ability or inclination, the mysterious factor is a vital force in the world and has to be reckoned with. Judicial preferment was the aim of his ambition. He meant to be a lawyer, and he wished to be a judge. His early bias in this direction was caused by his observation of the deference paid to his father as a justice of the peace.
"One day," said President Lincoln, "an emigrant stopped at my store, and asked me to buy a barrel of odds and ends, of little value, for which he had no room in his wagon. I found in it a two-volume copy of Blackstone's Commentaries. I devoured them. I never read anything which so interested and thrilled me. Soon after I began the study of law, and that is how I came to be a lawyer."
Old soldiers cannot be made to keep their seats as an excursion train pulls into Gettysburg. "There is where I was wounded. There is where we met the charge." It is touching to witness the comraderie, their sympathy. As they from the car windows come into sight of their struggles and victories they cannot avoid exclaiming "There we made our stand. There we advanced."
"There a man with forty-eight wounds was left for dead, and yet revived and lived beyond all expectations." One thing would be Spangler Springs from which, one night both sides drank. There the First Maryland, a Confederate regiment, clashed with the Second Maryland and two brothers, named Clark, were brought face to face, one being in each regiment and hence on each side of the fight. The Bloody Angle is a sort of Holy of Holies. You stand and read from an open book "The High Water Mark." Up to this point of ground, thus indicated, things seemed outwardly to be going one way. Turning points in history have a location on the earth. On a spot so exactly known as to bear the legend, cut in stone, "High Water Mark," the fortunes of war so abruptly turn that General Lee himself said, "This is the beginning of the end." Napoleon wanted Hougoumont, for as Hugo says, "This bit of earth, could he have taken it, would perhaps have given him the earth." On a piece of very common ground near Luz Jacob received an uninvited angel visitation. The stone on which he rested his head was only one of thousands. But with the morning what a change! It came like a beautiful vision