A NEW KNOCK AT AN OLD DOOR
Forty years were long enough to eliminate all the Israelites of one
generation. It appears that in that length of time all the adults of one
generation that had dwelt in Egypt were gone except two. Reckoning
things then on a scriptural basis and assuming that all who lived forty
years ago are gone, except two, a grave responsibility obviously rests
upon me, as I have seen more than a generation rise and wane, to let the
people of the present age or period in a definite locality know how
things look in that lifetime just preceding their own. I remember when
we had preaching services Sunday afternoon in all our churches at three
o'clock and by count in our church the attendance often differed only by
two, forenoon, afternoon and evening. I remember when Christmas and
Easter observances were introduced into Sabbath services, it having been
customary from Puritan days in New England to make, on Sunday, next to
no reference to them excepting in Catholic and Episcopal Churches.
_Lost Facts of Local History_
Unless one sticks a stake, at some definite point, say less than a
generation ago, he is not likely to remember that powerful electric
lights have not always been, like the images of the Israelites, on every
high hill and under every green tree. It is hard for me to realize that
at my table I burned the midnight oil in Lynn, particularly when the
next morning was Sunday, and my library during my ministry of twelve
years was never decorated with anything but a student lamp. The city was
in the kerosene oil period. The front hall lamp used to drip petroleum
upon the carpet on the stairs, and I was contributing my full share to
give John D. Rockefeller a start in his oil-refining business, a start
indeed that I hear he has not been slow to appreciate and improve. After
reaching the big hall down town, as the lights supplied to Professor
Churchill, the renowned elocutionist from Andover, seemed dim, I left
the hall and went out and bought a student lamp and had a wick put in
and filled it with kerosene, which if now brought into a blazing
auditorium in these enlightened days would be like holding a candle to
the sun. In a more significant way the city has turned from Darkness
into light.
_Publicity is Light_
We stood in relation to the gambling evil about where the country now
stands in relation to drunkeries, whose death warrant we have lived to
see signed. The hand-writing was written on the wall touching lotteries
but they were winked at when conducted only for sweet charity's sake
even after the death-knell had sounded. In a church fair a fine young
acquaintance got a pony for fifty cents as he held the lucky ticket.
Unless a person has felt it or witnessed it, he little conceives the
fury of the passion to which gambling appeals. When fired up, there are
men who would cross Sheol on a rotten pole to make money in a game of
chance. It starts an appetite that feeding does not satisfy. It seems to
rage by the fuel it feeds on. These lotteries, like the plague of frogs,
were everywhere. For constructing the earliest building of Williams
College, that is in particular the mother of missionaries, a lottery was
granted and $3500 were raised.[2] It goes with the blood in
Massachusetts, for when the State was hard up she used to spring a
lottery, in one of which Harvard College drew four tickets, and
clergymen seemed to have been particularly successful, and teachers for
purposes of publicity were likeliest of all to profit by the turn of
the wheel, till at length the whole gambling fabric suddenly, like the
walls of Jericho, fell down flat.
[Footnote 2: See Harper's Cyclopedia, p. 390, and The Book of Berkshire,
p. 30.]
_Cupid All Smiling_
Here was purely and distinctively an American City. The people were
homogeneous in language, modes of thought and type of character. She had
the specific New England, or Yankee, cast of mind. For her factories,
forces were drawn from the hillsides, particularly of New Hampshire.
There were elderly people, as we shall see, but the prevailing type was
youthful, and the young lady contingent was attractive and had a good
deal of the quality which we call charm. I wrote a column for a local
paper, out of my experience on "Tying the Silken Knot," and Dr. Henry
Hinckley, referring to my contribution and using my title, went beyond
even my testimony, affirming that the City of Shoes furnished more
marriageable material to the square rod than any other city of its size,
and he seemed to attribute the fact, not merely to the incident that
they met here under pleasant auspices, but that they heard in churches
that marriage is honorable and that it is not good for man to be alone.
A couple would come to the parsonage, and if the associate pastor went
to the door the young man would say, "Where's your foreman?" meaning
her husband. As the lady of the Manse was entirely supported by her
wedding fees and had money to lend, and as I married more people than
could be seated in my church, if they should come together at one time,
I have often deeply regretted that in the hurry and toil of removal, it
did not occur to me to invite them all to attend a special service to be
arranged for them, with specific hymns, and a practical address. I think
I can claim for the couples that I made happy, the banner low record in
the small percentage of divorces.
_The Royal Families_
The house of one parishioner was built in the century before the last,
while General Washington was alive and on the earth, and was rich in
history and tradition. A call upon the family was a lesson out of
Colonial Records, the paper on the wall like that at Mt. Vernon, being
of the same period.
"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 vicissitude
Of 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.
_A Social Revolution_
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.
_The Glory of the Commonplace_
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.
_The Missing Link_
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.
_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 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.
_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 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.
_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.
End of Project Gutenberg's Revisiting the Earth, by James Langdon Hill