This is the Chautauqua decennial year. Is it possible that it is ten
years? So rapid has been the growth, so many and varied the ideas and
features added from year to year, that we have not noted the flight
of time. Not in the space of a single editorial can be cited the
results of the first decade of Chautauqua history. It seems strange to
remember that only ten years ago Chautauqua and Chautauqua Lake were
comparatively unknown. Of the thousands who now, from north and south,
east and west, annually flock hither, few had then even heard of its
existence. It is not egotism, but only just to say that the lake owes
its now national fame to the present Chautauqua of the lake.
The visitor of ten or even five years ago is struck with the changes in
the physical aspect of the local Chautauqua. Then a few rude cottages
and tents in the woods with undressed and unkept grounds, now a large
village of beautiful summer homes. The unsightly tent has yielded to
the one graceful and attractive, and tents and cottages are all ranged
in comely streets. Ruts and gullies have been replaced with grades
and lawns. Even the old Auditorium which was thought in former days
to be without a rival of its kind, though still standing there in
honor, has been compelled to yield precedence to the amphitheater of
vaster proportions and better appointments. But the list is too long
for recital. There is the grand Hotel Athenæum, said to rival any
wood structure in the State, and equally superlative in every quality
as a home for its guests; there too is the Oriental House, Model of
Jerusalem, Hall of Philosophy, Children’s Temple, Tabernacle, and, if
you listen a moment, there is sound of hammer and saw as the work of
building and improving goes on rapidly as ever.
But if all this is of the local Chautauqua, what of the Chautauqua
which is national—nay, more than national? Ten years ago from a very
few of the neighboring States was gathered the first Sunday-school
Assembly. To-day the methods and ideas of that and subsequent
assemblies are being employed and taught by thousands of Sunday-school
teachers throughout the Union. Then, the able and eloquent speakers
that stood on the platform were heard only within the range of their
vocal power, but now the pages of the _Assembly Daily Herald_ catch
their thoughts and send them to distances of hundreds and thousands of
miles in all directions. The _personnel_ of the Chautauqua platform,
excellent as it was in the beginning, has been enhanced each year by
others of the most distinguished thinkers, scholars and orators of this
country and from beyond the waters.
We do not know how many dreamers there may have been, nor what their
dreams, but certainly none of the thousands of enthusiastic visitors
to Chautauqua in those days dreamed of the C. L. S. C. with tens of
thousands of earnest students, of the School of Languages, Teachers’
Retreat, and School of Theology, with all their characteristics of
power and inspiration.
Ten years of Chautauqua! Prolific mother, not alone of the above
offspring, but of children resembling herself, and doing similar work
at Lakeside, Lake Bluff, South Framingham, at Monterey, on the Pacific
slope, at Monteagle, Tenn., and elsewhere. Only ten years! and yet the
“Chautauqua Idea” has taken root, and is yielding its fruit of popular
education in all the States and in the Territories. Ten years, and
the meridian is not yet reached. Ten years are but a beginning in any
work so far reaching, so broad in its scope as the work of Chautauqua.
What has been done is but the starting point to what will be done. The
years to follow have much to reveal in the maturity of the plans and
principles now in operation, and of new ones yet to be inaugurated.