MISSISSIPPI FROZEN OVER AT ST. LOUIS—WHY THE BRIDGE AT ST. LOUIS IS
BUILT BY CHICAGO MEN—GENERAL SHERMAN—IDEAS ABOUT EDUCATION AT ST.
LOUIS—LIBERAL BEQUESTS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES—HOW NEW ENGLANDISM
LEAVENS THE WHOLE LUMP—THE GERMAN INVASION WILL NOT GERMANISE
AMERICA—ST. LOUIS—ITS RAPID GROWTH—ITS CHURCH ARCHITECTURE—AN IDEA
ON MENTAL CULTURE FROM THE WEST BANK OF THE MISSISSIPPI—A THOUGHT
SUGGESTED BY HEARING THE SKATERS ON THE MISSISSIPPI TALKING ENGLISH.
On leaving Odin I saw the prairie for the first time. It was a sea of
rich level land, and was here everywhere under cultivation. Since I
had left Washington, I had not till now seen cultivation and houses
everywhere around me, as far as the eye could reach. After some hours
we came to undulating land where coal-mining was being carried on.
There were several pits alongside of the rail. The seam of coal, I
was told, is seven feet thick. At ten o’clock we reached East St.
Louis. Only a few days ago I had been among the oranges, bananas, and
sugar-canes; and now I looked upon the mighty Mississippi, solidly
frozen from shore to shore, and saw multitudes of persons crossing and
recrossing on the ice. So great is the range of climate in this vast
country, and yet, by the aid of steam, so near to each other are the
two extremes!
[Sidenote: _An Advantage of Youth._]
At St. Louis, the Mississippi is crossed by very powerful steam
ferries, and a passage across the river has for this purpose to be kept
open and free from ice. The Bluff has been escarped to enable vehicles
to get down to the water-side. The crush and crowd were very great, and
to increase the difficulty of getting down, the face of the descent was
at that time coated thickly with ice. I saw two loaded waggons capsize,
and the coach I was in at one time began to slip, and we were only
saved by the skill of the driver. The ferry boat took over more than a
dozen coaches and waggons each trip, many of them having four horses.
The city of St. Louis is on the further or western bank, and all the
traffic of the city and of the vast region beyond it crosses at this
ferry. It will not, however, be needed much longer, for the foundations
are now being laid for a bridge, which, like that at Niagara, will
carry foot-passengers and all kinds of horse-drawn vehicles, as well
as the railway trains. It is a strange thing that this bridge is being
built, not by the people of St. Louis itself, but by capital advanced
by Chicago men. The reason is not far to seek. St. Louis, regarded as
a considerable place, is ten or fifteen years older than Chicago. The
moneyed men therefore at St. Louis are getting into years, and so have
become cautious, and indisposed to try new investments. The Chicago men
are still young: the enterprise of youth in them is not yet exhausted;
and so they are ready to entertain, and even to accept, new ideas; and
a proposal, however grand, or novel, or costly it may be, is not on
these accounts appalling to them. In America, where everything is ever
moving and changing, an elderly man is unfit for business.
At St. Louis I became acquainted with General Sherman. I mention this
because it may be interesting to hear what were one’s impressions of
the man who conceived and executed one of the boldest and most arduous
military achievements of modern times—that of marching his army down
through the heart of the Southern States to Charleston and Savannah. He
is tall and thin, without an ounce of flesh to spare. He gives you the
idea of a man who is ready at any moment to tax his mental and bodily
powers to any amount possible for human nature, and that they would
respond to the demands made upon them without flagging, only that his
frame would become more and more fleshless and wiry. If you had not
known that he was General Sherman, still you would have thought him
one of the kindliest and friendliest men you had ever met. His first
questions were, whether there was anything he could do for me? any
letters he could write for me to persons in St. Louis or Missouri? any
information on any subject that it was in his power to give me? The
letters of introduction he supplied me with he wrote with his own hand.
He interested himself about my intended excursion to the Plains and
Rocky Mountains, going over the route with me, and advising me what to
see and what to do, and bid me not to hesitate about applying to him
for anything I wanted that he could do for me. His physiognomy agrees
with his military life in indicating that he is a man of unflinching
determination. His first thought on undertaking anything appears to
be, as it was with our Iron Duke, to master thoroughly all the details
of the subject, to ascertain what will be wanted down to the minutest
particular, and to provide for everything.
[Sidenote: _Educational Ideas at St. Louis._]
As the superintendent of schools at St. Louis, to whom I had a letter
from Washington, was confined to his house by illness, I took a letter
from General Sherman to the president of an institution at St. Louis
that goes by the name of the ‘Washington University.’ It is not a
university in our sense of the word, but an institution for working
connectedly the different educational resources of the place, beginning
with the elementary schools, and passing up through grammar and high
schools to a kind of polytechnic institution, in which arts rather
than sciences are taught, the arts in truth being little more than
the principles and practice of different trades and occupations. This
seems to us a low view to take of education and of a university. But
it is what is first wanted in a new country, where every man has to
work for his bread, and everything has to be done. Higher culture is
not for the existing, but for future generations. So think the people
who manage this institution. And so think the people for whose benefit
the institution has been established, except that they have little or
no idea at all, as yet, of the ‘higher culture.’ They are beginning
to be intolerant even of the time and money spent in teaching law and
medicine, and of the position assigned to lawyers and physicians. It
was in this spirit that a gentleman said to me, on the prairie between
Chicago and Omaha, ‘What we want, sir, in this great country, is fewer
graduates of law and medicine, and more graduates of the machine shop
and agricultural college.’
This Washington University has had 800,000 dollars presented and
bequeathed to it by citizens of St. Louis in the last eleven years; and
as the war, and the collapse that followed the war, cover more than
half of this period, the sum appears very considerable. This is in the
spirit, and it is a very common spirit in America, of the times when
our own colleges and schools were founded.
The president told me that he came from New England to settle at St.
Louis thirty years ago. He rode all the way. At that time the country
was so little settled that he would ride by compass a whole day without
seeing a log hut or a human being. He brought with him to St. Louis the
ideas and the traditions of New England. His son had, following the
example of his father, moved on westward. He had crossed the mountains
and settled in Oregon, on the Pacific coast. His son had been brought
up at St. Louis in the ideas and traditions of New England, and had
taken them with him. In this way it is that the New England element,
which is a distinct character, is kept up and propagated throughout the
whole West. Other emigrants bring with them nothing of so tough and
perdurable a nature; New Englandism therefore must spread till it has
leavened the whole lump.
[Sidenote: _America will not be Germanised._]
In the West one is frequently confronted by the question, What will be
the effect on the Americans of the future of the vast hordes of Germans
which yearly invade and settle in the country? Whole districts are
occupied by them, beginning in Pennsylvania, to the exclusion of the
English language. In the Western towns you will see street after street
in which half, or more than half, the names are German. They have
their own hotels, their own newspapers, their own theatres. It seems a
greater invasion than that of the Roman Empire by their fathers. That
overthrew the empire, and for a time disorganised society; it, however,
did not extend the language of the Fatherland into Italy, Spain, or
France. But here is a continuous stream of between 200,000 and 300,000,
every year coming, not with sword and torch to slay and to burn, or to
perish themselves, but with the axe and the plough to clear away the
forest, and to cultivate the soil. Every one that comes is taken up
into that entity which will be the America of the future. What then
will be the effect? Many Americans fear that it will not be good.
‘Because,’ say they, ‘the Germans are deficient in spirituality.’ That
is the word they use. ‘They have no religious devotion: this element
appears to have been left out of their composition.’
I am disposed to think that they will have very little power to modify
the future character of the nation. First, because they are all
learning, and must all learn, the English language, which cannot but
become their mother tongue. This being the case, they must imbibe the
ideas current in America in that language; and so German ideas will
fade away and die out of their minds.
Another reason I have for my opinion is, that the conflict is between
Germanism and New Englandism; and it is carried on upon what may be
regarded as the soil of New England. But New Englandism is a far
tougher plant, and one of far more vigorous growth than Germanism,
especially when transplanted to another world, very unlike that of the
Rhine and of the Danube. For these reasons I believe that the German
invasion will be absorbed and lost in America. It will not Germanise
the Americans, but will itself be Americanised.
This applies to ideas, not to temperament, which is a matter of blood
and nerves; and it is possible that the highly excitable American
temperament may be somewhat calmed by the phlegm of Germany. But if
this effect be produced, we can hardly expect that it will be lasting,
for in time America will change the temperament of the German, just as
it has changed the temperament of the Anglo-Saxon.
St. Louis is a large and well-built city of about 280,000 inhabitants.
In the year 1836 it was only a French village of about 3,000 souls,
almost all of whom were Canadians and Canadian half-breeds. In those
days the wild Indian was close upon it. Now the French and the Indians
are both alike obliterated, and railways reach between five and six
hundred miles beyond it. It contains many churches, some of which are
built in very good taste and style. I never saw red brick anywhere else
used so pleasingly and effectively in pointed architecture, as in the
spire of one of the churches in this city. I was also much struck with
a stone church, the tower of which was not yet completed. Each window
in the side aisles had a second window over it, in the form of a kind
of window head or marigold. The main aisle had clerestory windows.
All the windows throughout were filled with stained glass. This fine
church belonged to the Episcopal communion. There are six Episcopal
congregations in St. Louis. I here became acquainted with a clergyman
who had just returned from a long tour through Europe and the East. It
was strange, on the west bank of the Mississippi, on a spot where red
men had sold their furs, and smoked their pipes, in the memory of the
speaker himself, to hear expressed the opinion, ‘that a man of culture
and thought had not completed his education till he had seen with his
own eyes the scenes in which the great events of man’s past history had
been enacted.’
[Sidenote: _Thoughts from the Mississippi._]
While crossing the Mississippi on the ice, I could not hear unmoved the
shoals of skaters cheering, and shouting, and talking merrily in good
English, just as if it were all on the Serpentine in the Park; and I
thought to myself that that small piece of water in the midst of London
does not belong more completely to the English race than the Father of
Waters himself does now, and must for ever.