Estabrook, authorized the farmers’ institutes, and placed them under the
control of the regents of the University, who have the power to select
a State superintendent to control them. A committee of three of the
regents has special charge of the institutes. Thus the farmers are
brought into direct relation with the University, and while, as a
prospectus says, they are not actually non-resident students of the
University, they receive information and instruction directly from it.
The State appropriates twelve thousand dollars a year to this work,
which pays the salaries of Mr. W. H. Morrison, the superintendent, to
whose tact and energy the success of the institutes is largely due, and
his assistants, and enables him to pay the expenses of specialists
and agriculturists who can instruct the farmers and wisely direct the
discussions at the meetings. By reason of this complete organization,
which penetrates every part of the State, subjects of most advantage are
considered, and time is not wasted in merely amateur debates.
I know of no other State where a like system of popular instruction on
a vital and universal interest of the State, directed by the highest
educational authority, is so perfectly organized and carried on with
such unity of purpose and detail of administration; no other in which
the farmer is brought systematically into such direct relations to the
university. In the current year there have been held eighty-two
farmers’ institutes in forty-five counties. The list of practical topics
discussed is 279, and in this service have been engaged one hundred and
seven workers, thirty-one of whom are specialists from other States.
This is an “agricultural college,” on a grand scale, brought to the
homes of the people. The meetings are managed by local committees in
such a way as to evoke local pride, interest, and talent. I will
mention some of the topics that were thoroughly discussed at one of
the institutes: clover as a fertilizer; recuperative agriculture;
bee-keeping; taking care of the little things about the house and
farm; the education for farmers’ daughters; the whole economy of sheep
husbandry; egg production; poultry; the value of thought and application
in farming; horses to breed for the farm and market; breeding and
management of swine; mixed farming; grain-raising; assessment and
collection of taxes; does knowledge pay? (with illustrations of money
made by knowledge of the market); breeding and care of cattle, with
expert testimony as to the best sorts of cows; points in corn culture;
full discussion of small-fruit culture; butter-making as a line art; the
daily; our country roads; agricultural education. So, during the winter,
every topic that concerns the well-being of the home, the prolit of
the farm, the moral welfare of the people and their prosperity, was
intelligently discussed, with audiences fully awake to the value of this
practical and applied education. Some of the best of these discussions
are printed and widely distributed. Most of them are full of wise
details in the way of thrift and money-making, but I am glad to see that
the meetings also consider the truth that as much care should be given
to the rearing of boys and girls as of calves and colts, and that brains
are as necessary in farming as in any other occupation.
As these farmers’ institutes are conducted, I do not know any influence
comparable to them in waking up the farmers to think, to inquire into
new and improved methods, and to see in what real prosperity consists.
With prosperity, as a rule, the farmer and his family are conservative,
law-keeping, church-going, good citizens. The little appropriation of
twelve thousand dollars has already returned to the State a hundred-fold
financially and a thousand-fold in general intelligence.
I have spoken of the habit in Minnesota and Wisconsin of depending
mostly upon one crop—that of spring wheat—and the disasters from this
single reliance in bad years. Hard lessons are beginning to teach the
advantage of mixed farming and stockraising. In this change the farmers’
institutes of Wisconsin have been potent. As one observer says, “They
have produced a revolution in the mode of farming, raising crops, and
caring for stock.” The farmers have been enabled to protect themselves
against the effects of drought and other evils. Taking the advice of the
institute in 1886, the farmers planted 50,000 acres of ensilage corn,
which took the place of the short hay crop caused by the drought.
This provision saved thousands of dollars’ worth of stock in several
counties. From all over the State comes the testimony of farmers as to
the good results of the institute work, like this: “Several thousand
dollars’ worth of improved stock have been brought in. Creameries and
cheese-factories have been established and well supported. Farmers are
no longer raising grain exclusively as heretofore. Our hill-sides are
covered with clover. Our farmers are encouraged to labor anew. A new era
of prosperity in our State dates from the farmers’ institutes.”
There is abundant evidence that a revolution is going on in the farming
of Wisconsin, greatly assisted, if not inaugurated, by this systematic
popular instruction from the University as a centre. It may not greatly
interest the reader that the result of this will be greater agricultural
wealth in Wisconsin, but it does concern him that putting intelligence
into farming must inevitably raise the level of the home life and the
general civilization of Wisconsin. I have spoken of this centralized,
systematic effort in some detail because it seems more efficient than
the work of agricultural societies and sporadic institutes in other
States.
In another matter Wisconsin has taken a step in advance of other States;
that is, in the care of the insane. The State has about 2600 insane,
increasing at the rate of about 167 a year. The provisions in the State
for these are the State Hospital (capacity of 500), Northern Hospital
(capacity of 600), the Milwaukee Asylum (capacity of 255), and fifteen
county asylums for the chronic insane, including two nearly ready
(capacity 1220). The improvement in the care of the insane consists in
several particulars—the doing away of restraints, either by mechanical
appliances or by narcotics, reasonable separation of the chronic cases
from the others, increased liberty, and the substitution of wholesome
labor for idleness. Many of these changes have been brought about by the
establishment of county asylums, the feature of which I wish specially
to speak. The State asylums were crowded beyond their proper capacity,
classification was difficult in them, and a large number of the insane
were miserably housed in county jails and poor-houses. The evils of
great establishments were more and more apparent, and it was determined
to try the experiment of county asylums. These have now been in
operation for six years, and a word about their constitution and
perfectly successful operation may be of public service.
These asylums, which are only for the chronic insane, are managed by
local authorities, but under constant and close State supervision; this
last provision is absolutely essential, and no doubt accounts for the
success of the undertaking. It is not necessary here to enter into
details as to the construction of these buildings. They are of brick,
solid, plain, comfortable, and of a size to accommodate not less than
fifty nor more than one hundred inmates: an institution with less than
fifty is not economical; one with a larger number than one hundred is
unwieldy, and beyond the personal supervision of the superintendent. A
farm is needed for economy in maintenance and to furnish occupation for
the men; about four acres for each inmate is a fair allowance. The
land should be fertile, and adapted to a variety of crops as well as to
cattle, and it should have woodland to give occupation in the winter.
The fact is recognized that idleness is no better for an insane than
for a sane person. The house-work is all done by the women; the farm,
garden, and general out-door work by the men. Experience shows that
three-fourths of the chronic insane can be furnished occupation of
some sort, and greatly to their physical and moral well-being. The
nervousness incident always to restraint and idleness disappears with
liberty and occupation. Hence greater happiness and comfort to the
insane, and occasionally a complete or partial cure.
About one attendant to twenty insane persons is sufficient, but it is
necessary that these should have intelligence and tact; the men capable
of leading in farm-work, the women to instruct in house-work and
dress-making, and it is well if they can play some musical instrument
and direct in amusements. One of the most encouraging features of this
experiment in small asylums has been the discovery of so many efficient
superintendents and matrons among the intelligent farmers and business
men of the rural districts, who have the practical sagacity and
financial ability to carry on these institutions successfully.
These asylums are as open as a school; no locked doors (instead of
window-bars, the glass-frames are of iron painted white), no pens made
by high fences. The inmates are free to go and come at their work, with
no other restraint than the watch of the attendants. The asylum is a
home and not a prison. The great thing is to provide occupation. The
insane, it is found, can be trained to regular industry, and it is
remarkable how little restraint is needed if an earnest effort is made
to do without it. In the county asylums of Wisconsin about one person in
a thousand is in restraint or seclusion each day. The whole theory seems
to be to treat the insane like persons in some way diseased, who need
occupation, amusement, kindness. The practice of this theory in the
Wisconsin county asylums is so successful that it must ultimately affect
the treatment of the insane all over the country.
And the beauty of it is that it is as economical as it is enlightened
and humane. The secret of providing occupation for this class is to buy
as little material and hire as little labor as possible; let the women
make the clothes, and the men do the farm-work without the aid of
machinery. The surprising result of this is that some of these asylums
approach the point of being self-supporting, and all of them save money
to the counties, compared with the old method. The State has not lost
by these asylums, and the counties have gained; nor has the economy been
purchased at the expense of humanity to the insane; the insane in the
county asylums have been as well clothed, lodged, and fed as in the
State institutions, and have had more freedom, and consequently more
personal comfort and a better chance of abating their mania. This is the
result arrived at by an exhaustive report on these county asylums in the
report of the State Board of Charities and Reforms, of which Mr. Albert
O. Wright is secretary. The average cost per week per capita of patients
in the asylums by the latest report was, in the State Hospital, $4.39;
in the Northern Hospital, $4.33; in the county asylums, $1.89.
The new system considers the education of the chronic insane an
important part of their treatment; not specially book-learning (though
that may be included), but training of the mental, moral, and physical
faculties in habits of order, propriety, and labor. By these means
wonders have been worked for the insane. The danger, of course, is that
the local asylums may fall into unproductive routine, and that politics
will interfere with the intelligent State supervision. If Wisconsin is
able to keep her State institutions out of the clutches of men with whom
politics is a business simply for what they can make out of it (as it is
with those who oppose a civil service not based upon partisan dexterity
and subserviency), she will carry her enlightened ideas into the making
of a model State. The working out of such a noble reform as this in the
treatment of the insane can only be intrusted to men specially qualified
by knowledge, sympathy, and enthusiasm, and would be impossible in the
hands of changing political workers. The systematized enlightenment
of the farmers in the farmers’ institutes by means of their vital
connection with the University needs the steady direction of those
who are devoted to it, and not to any party success. As to education
generally, it may be said that while for the present the popular favor
to the State University depends upon its being “practical” in this and
other ways, the time will come when it will be seen that the highest
service it can render the State is by upholding pure scholarship,
without the least material object.
Another institution of which Wisconsin has reason to be proud is the
State Historical Society—a corporation (dating from 1853) with perpetual
succession, supported by an annual appropriation of five thousand
dollars, with provisions for printing the reports of the society and the
catalogues of the library. It is housed in the Capitol. The society has
accumulated interesting historical portraits, cabinets of antiquities,
natural history, and curiosities, a collection of copper, and some
valuable MSS. for the library. The library is one of the best historical
collections in the country. The excellence of it is largely due to Lyman
C. Draper, LL.D., who was its secretary for thirty-three years, but who
began as early as 1834 to gather facts and materials for border history
and biography, and who had in 1852 accumulated thousands of manuscripts
and historical statements, the nucleus of the present splendid library,
which embraces rare and valuable works relating to the history of nearly
every State. This material is arranged by States, and readily accessible
to the student. Indeed, there are few historical libraries in the
country where historical research in American subjects can be better
prosecuted than in this. The library began in January, 1854, with fifty
volumes. In January, 1887, it had 57,935 volumes and 60,731 pamphlets
and documents, making a total of 118,666 titles.
There is a large law library in the State-house, the University has a
fair special library for the students, and in the city is a good public
circulating library, free, supported by a tax, and much used. For a
young city, it is therefore very well off for books.
Madison is not only an educational centre, but an intelligent city; the
people read and no doubt buy books, but they do not support book-stores.
The shops where books are sold are variety-shops, dealing in stationery,
artists’ materials, cheap pictures, bric-à-brac. Books are of minor
importance, and but few are “kept in stock.” Indeed, bookselling is not
a profitable part of the business; it does not pay to “handle” books,
or to keep the run of new publications, or to keep a supply of standard
works. In this the shops of Madison are not peculiar. It is true all
over the West, except in two or three large cities, and true, perhaps,
not quite so generally in the East; the book-shops are not the literary
and intellectual centres they used to be.
There are several reasons given for this discouraging state of the
book-trade. Perhaps it is true that people accustomed to newspapers full
of “selections,” to the flimsy publications found on the cheap counters,
and to the magazines, do not buy “books that are books,” except for
“furnishing;” that they depend more and more upon the circulating
libraries for anything that costs more than an imported cigar or half
a pound of candy. The local dealers say that the system of the great
publishing houses is unsatisfactory as to prices and discounts. Private
persons can get the same discounts as the dealers, and can very likely,
by ordering a list, buy more cheaply than of the local bookseller, and
therefore, as a matter of business, he says that it does not pay to
keep books; he gives up trying to sell them, and turns his attention to
“varieties.” Another reason for the decline in the trade may be in the
fact that comparatively few booksellers are men of taste in letters, men
who read, or keep the run of new publications. If a retail grocer knew
no more of his business than many booksellers know of theirs, he would
certainly fail. It is a pity on all accounts that the book-trade is
in this condition. A bookseller in any community, if he is a man of
literary culture, and has a love of books and knowledge of them, can do
a great deal for the cultivation of the public taste. His shop becomes
a sort of intellectual centre of the town. If the public find there
an atmosphere of books, and are likely to have their wants met for
publications new or rare, they will generally sustain the shop; at
least this is my observation. Still, I should not like to attempt to say
whether the falling off in the retail book-trade is due to want of skill
in the sellers, to the publishing machinery, or to public indifference.
The subject is worthy the attention of experts. It is undeniably
important to maintain everywhere these little depots of intellectual
supply. In a town new to him the visitor is apt to estimate the taste,
the culture, the refinement, as well as the wealth of the town, by its
shops. The stock in the dry goods and fancy stores tells one thing, that
in the art-stores another thing, that in the book-stores another thing,
about the inhabitants. The West, even on the remote frontiers, is full
of magnificent stores of goods, telling of taste as well as luxury; the
book-shops are the poorest of all.
The impression of the North-west, thus far seen, is that of tremendous
energy, material refinement, much open-mindedness, considerable
self-appreciation,’ uncommon sagacity in meeting new problems, generous
hospitality, the Old Testament notion of possessing this world, rather
more recognition of the pecuniary as the only success than exists in
the East and South, intense national enthusiasm, and unblushing and most
welcome “Americanism.”
In these sketchy observations on the North-west nothing has seemed to me
more interesting and important than the agricultural changes going on
in eastern Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. In the vast wheat farms, as
well as in the vast cattle ranges, there is an element of speculation,
if not of gambling, of the chance of immense profits or of considerable
loss, that is neither conducive to the stable prosperity nor to the
moral soundness of a State. In the breaking up of the great farms, and
in the introduction of varied agriculture and cattle-raising on a small
scale, there will not be so many great fortunes made, but each State
will be richer as a whole, and less liable to yearly fluctuations in
prosperity. But the gain most worth considering will be in the home
life and the character of the citizens. The best life of any community
depends upon varied industries. No part of the United States has ever
prospered, as regards the well-being of the mass of the people, that
relied upon the production of a single staple.
IX.—CHICAGO. [First Paper.]
Chicago is becoming modest. Perhaps the inhabitants may still be able to
conceal their modesty, but nevertheless they feel it. The explanation
is simple. The city has grown not only beyond the most sanguine
expectations of those who indulged in the most inflated hope of its
future, but it has grown beyond what they said they expected. This gives
the citizens pause—as it might an eagle that laid a roc’s egg.
The fact is, Chicago has become an independent organism, growing by a
combination of forces and opportunities, beyond the contrivance of
any combination of men to help or hinder, beyond the need of flaming
circulars and reports of boards of trade, and process pictures. It has
passed the danger or the fear of rivalry, and reached the point where
the growth of any other portion of the great North-west, or of any
city in it (whatever rivalry that city may show in industries or in
commerce), is in some way a contribution to the power and wealth of
Chicago. To them that have shall be given. Cities, under favoring
conditions for local expansion, which reach a certain amount of
population and wealth, grow by a kind of natural increment, the law of
attraction, very well known in human nature, which draws a person to an
active city of two hundred thousand rather than to a stagnant city of
one hundred thousand. And it is a fortunate thing for civilization that
this attraction is almost as strong to men of letters as it is to men of
affairs. Chicago has, it seems to me, only recently turned this point of
assured expansion, and, as I intimated, the inhabitants have hardly yet
become accustomed to this idea; but I believe that the time is near when
they will be as indifferent to what strangers think of Chicago as the
New-Yorkers are to what strangers think of New York. New York is
to-day the only American city free from this anxious note of
provincialism—though in Boston it rather takes the form of pity for the
unenlightened man who doubts its superiority; but the impartial student
of Chicago to-day can see plenty of signs of the sure growth of this
metropolitan indifference. And yet there is still here enough of the old
Chicago stamp to make the place interesting.
It is everything in getting a point of view. Last summer a lady of New
Orleans who had never before been out of her native French city, and
who would look upon the whole North with the impartial eyes of a
foreigner—and more than that, with Continental eyes—visited Chicago, and
afterwards New York. “Which city did you like best?” I asked, without
taking myself seriously in the question. To my surprise, she hesitated.
This hesitation was fatal to all my preconceived notions. It mattered
not thereafter which she preferred: she had hesitated. She was actually
comparing Chicago to New York in her mind, as one might compare Paris
and London. The audacity of the comparison I saw was excused by its
innocence. I confess that it had never occurred to me to think of
Chicago in that Continental light. “Well,” she said, not seeing at all
the humor of my remark, “Chicago seems to me to have finer buildings and
residences, to be the more beautiful city; but of course there is more
in New York; it is a greater city; and I should prefer to live there for
what I want.” This naïve observation set me thinking, and I wondered if
there was a point of view, say that of divine omniscience and fairness,
in which Chicago would appear as one of the great cities of the world,
in fact a metropolis, by-and-by to rival in population and wealth any
city of the seaboard. It has certainly better commercial advantages,
so far as water communication and railways go, than Paris or Pekin or
Berlin, and a territory to supply and receive from infinitely vaster,
richer, and more promising than either. This territory will have
many big cities, but in the nature of things only one of surpassing
importance. And taking into account its geographical position—a thousand
miles from the Atlantic seaboard on the one side, and from the mountains
on the other, with the acknowledged tendency of people and of money to
it as a continental centre—it seems to me that Chicago is to be that
one.
The growth of Chicago is one of the marvels of the world. I do not
wonder that it is incomprehensible even to those who have seen it year
by year. As I remember it in 1860, it was one of the shabbiest and most
unattractive cities of about a hundred thousand inhabitants anywhere to
be found; but even then it had more than trebled its size in ten years;
the streets were mud sloughs, the sidewalks were a series of stairs and
more or less rotten planks, half the town was in process of elevation
above the tadpole level, and a considerable part of it was on wheels—the
moving house being about the only wheeled vehicle that could get around
with any comfort to the passengers. The west side was a straggling
shanty-town, the north side was a country village with two or three
“aristocratic” houses occupying a square, the south side had not a
handsome business building in it, nor a public edifice of any merit
except a couple of churches, but there were a few pleasant residences on
Michigan avenue fronting the encroaching lake, and on Wabash avenue. Yet
I am not sure that even then the exceedingly busy and excited traders
and speculators did not feel that the town was more important than
New York. For it had a great business. Aside from its real estate
operations, its trade that year was set down at $97,000,000, embracing
its dealing in produce, its wholesale supply business, and its
manufacturing.