As a boy, thirty years ago, I used to observe, with a boy’s interest,
the little bob-tailed street cars that went teetering and tinkling, at
intervals of half an hour, out a long street that ran within a block
of my home. I watched the cars intently, and so intently that the
impressions of their various colors, sounds and smells have remained
with me to this day, speaking, in a way, of the conditions of a small
American city of that time, and affording a means by which to measure
that progress in material efficiency which is so often mistaken for
progress in speculative thought.
It may have been that my interest was intensified by the fact that down
in Urbana Street cars were unknown, though they were not unimagined,
since we used to see them when we went to Cincinnati, and I could then,
and I can still, recall, though time has softened the poignancy of that
hour, the pain of parting with a certain noble horse which my father
sold to a man of dark and hateful aspect, and of the morsel of comfort
I derived from the stipulation, invalid enough to be sure, my father
made with the dealer, that the horse was not to be put to street-car
service. That, by my father, and so by me myself, was held to be the
most cruel, degrading and ignoble fate that could befall a horse.
But another reason for my interest was the possession of a curiosity
to which the passing show has always been novel, generally amusing,
sometimes pleasing and often saddening, too--a curiosity in life which
I hope will endure fresh and wholesome until life’s largest curiosity
shall be satisfied at the end of life.
The progress of the little street car under notice was leisurely and
deliberate, sometimes it would wait obligingly for a woman, half a
block away, who hurried puffing, and fluttering, and waving, to reach
the street corner, and when she had clambered aboard, the driver
would slowly unwind his brake, cluck to his horse, the rope traces
would strain and the car would bowl along. Ten blocks away from the
business section, or a few blocks further on, the little car with its
five windows and small hooded platform would enter upon a bare, though
expectant scene of vacant lots, and about a mile out, where there
was some lonely dwelling staring blankly and reproachfully as though
it had been misled, and then abandoned, and further on a few small,
expectant cottages, the long, low street-car barn was reached, the car
was driven on to a little turntable, slowly turned about and started
back. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I had a chance to witness the change
of horses, and to experience a nebulous pity for the nag that ambled
contentedly into the stable, and did not seem to be very tired after
all.
On Summit Street there were grander cars, each drawn by two horses,
and there were other lines in town, each with its cars painted a
distinguishing color. There was one line that went out Collingwood
Avenue, far to the very country itself; its cars bowled under noble
trees and even past a stately mansion or two, or what in those days
seemed stately mansions, and it was pleasant, it was even musical,
to hear the tinkle of the bell on the horse’s collar. Then there
was still another line that ran down the broad Maumee River, almost
to Maumee Bay and the “marsh” where the French _habitants_ lived,
and spoke delightfully like the people in Dr. Drummond’s poems. On
Saturday mornings my father was likely to send me on an errand to a
superannuated clergyman who lived down there, and this involved a long,
irritating journey. The journey occupied the whole morning, and spoiled
a holiday. And then it was always cold, for, in the not too clear
retrospect, I seem to have been sent on this particular errand only
in winter, and the car was the coldest place in the world, especially
when it got down where the winds from the icy lake could strike it.
Its floor was strewn recklessly with yellow straw, in some ironical
pretense of keeping the car warm, and I would sit there with feet
slowly freezing in the rustling straw, and after I had inspected the
two or three passengers, there was nothing to do but to read the notice
over the fare-box in the front end of the car, until I had it quite by
heart:
“The driver will furnish change to the amount of Two Dollars, returning
the full amount, thus enabling the passenger to put the exact fare in
the box.”
Then I could peer up toward the fare-box and look at the one nickel
stranded half-way down its zig-zag chute, and look at the driver,
standing on the front platform, slowly rocking from one foot to the
other, bundled up in old overcoats, with his cap pulled down and his
throat and chin muffled in a repulsive woolen scarf, hoary with the
frost of his breath, and nothing of him visible except the shining
red point of his frosted nose. His hands, one holding the reins, the
other the brake-handle, were lost in the various strata of mittens that
marked epochs co-extensive with those of the several overcoats. I had
read once in a newspaper of a street-car driver in Indianapolis who, at
the end of his run, never moved, but kept right on standing there, and
when the barn-boss swore at him, it was found that he was dead, frozen
at his post. And I sometimes wondered, as I dwelt on that fascinating
horror, if it were possible that sometime, when the car reached the
bay, this driver would not be found frozen. Sometimes I expected to
be found frozen myself, but nothing exciting ever happened on that
journey, and so, somehow, the trips out other streets and other avenues
in other cars, remain more pleasantly in the memory, associated with
the sunshine and the leafy arch of green overhead, with something of
the romance and mystery of untraveled roads in the long vista ahead,
while the winter trip down to the superannuated clergyman’s is cold and
bleak and desolate, perhaps because it had no more interesting result
than the few minutes I begrudged in that stiff little “parlor,” where
the preacher received me with the not unkindly regard of eyes that
had the dazed expression of the very old. I can expiate the perfectly
patent and impolite reluctance with which I visited the aged man,
and the thoughtless contempt youth has for age itself, only by the
hope that those dim eyes have since brightened at the realization of
those glories they had so long foreseen, which formed perhaps the only
consolation of a life that must have had little to gladden it on that
forbidding spot.
All these lines, and others like them in the sprawling young town,
belonged each to different men, and once I happened to hear that the
man who owned the line first mentioned say that every new family that
moved into that thoroughfare or built a house there, meant $73.00 a
year to him. A good many families moved out into that street, enough
indeed to make a settlement that was a town in itself, growing and
spreading at the end of the line. Gradually the gaunt vacancies
between were built up, though not, it appears, until the man had grown
discouraged and sold out, and so suffered the universal fate of the
pioneer. One by one the other lines in town were sold, and finally
a day came when all the lines were owned by a certain few men, who
under our purely individualistic legal system, formed a company and
thus could jointly rejoice in all the individual rights and privileges
of a person, without any of his embarrassing moral duties and
responsibilities.
I ceased to hear of the individual owner any more; I never saw him in
his shirt-sleeves in his little office at the end of the line counting
up the nickels of those new families which each meant $73.00 per
annum to him, and it must have been about the same time that I began
to hear of the traction company. There had been probably intervening
experiments with tough mules, whom no one pitied, as everyone had
pitied the horses they replaced, and there were, in other cities,
astounding miracles of cable cars and elevated railways. And then
electricity came as a motive power, and the streets were made hideous
by the gaunt poles and makeshifts of wires, and the trolley cars came,
and increased in size and numbers, and families swarmed, until out
on those streets and avenues the great yellow cars went rushing and
clanging by, with multitudes of people clinging to the straps and,
toward evening, swarming like flies on the broad rear platforms, and
the conductors in their blue uniforms shouting “Step lively!” with a
voice as authoritative as that which the company spoke in the city
councils. And the families continued to arrive, and to build houses,
and to toil and to contribute each its $73.00 a year, though they did
it with human reluctance and complaint, and grew dimly conscious that
somewhere in the whole complicated transaction an injustice lurked.
And finally this hidden injustice became the chief public concern of
the people of the town, and an issue in local politics for more than a
decade.