Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/65

Rh of our national life gives a coloring to the fabric which makes what we call a "social atmosphere." This atmosphere is a bit clearer in the Middle West than it is in the metropolis, while democracy is more real, more impressive, there to those who like democracy, and may be more oppressive to those who do not.

In the end all that one can say is that social distinctions are more abundant in one part of the country than in another, just as social exactions are heavier in the city than they are in the country; that there is more leisure in one part of the country than in another; that there is a larger distribution both of capital and of culture in one part than in another; that there is a more promiscuous democracy in one place than in another; and that the American who starts in the race of life without fortune and without powerful friends will get on best in that part of the land where there are, proportionally, fewer strivers and more numerous opportunities. What ought to be insisted upon by all Americans who believe that character is better than ancestry is that democracy does not consist alone in freedom of manners and in lack of social distinctions.

While it is true that you feel your approach to the Far West while you are still in this charming middle country, you realize more and more as you linger in it—and linger in it you will if the hospitable people can keep you—that the influence of the "old home" is gaining ground there. Yet, after all, the product is very different, and it is also very likeable. Let it be borne in mind that we are not now walking in the business streets of these Middle-Western cities and towns as if they were the one object of our tour, but that we are glancing at them while we hasten on to the resonant parts of the town—that is, the parts known as "residential." But business is a necessary evil, like most government, or as war used to be when the Christian spirit was trying to force its way into human society, and as it is still thought to be by some who regard Christianity as essentially feminine, not realizing or comprehending that which is the beautiful side of the masculine character. Ostensibly this is a land of business, the Middle West, and it is a land of wonderful prosperity. Business and enterprise show their black sides by filling the normally blue atmosphere with black smoke. Cleveland permits business to push its way into Euclid Avenue. Chicago puts its oldest and its most conspicuous club where its genial midday habits may act as a preventive of nervous prostration, and other towns have other ways of showing, by involuntary cerebration, the need of laying the foundation in good, stiff gold mortar. In its material aspect, its marvellous growth, in the fruits of prescience, of courage, and of industrious toil, the Eastern man of long ago has vindicated his emigration to the West of his day. Here is a fat land, here are wealth and comfort, and a cultivation with a much larger measure of refinement in its leading social circles than is always to be found among some similar circles in the farther Eastern cities.

Say what the East may, or the West does, it is here that one finds the largest sum or aggregate of the comforts, the conveniences, and the luxuries of ordinary every-day life. New York may possess more splendid hotels than Chicago—I have not the intrepidity to assert that it does,—but in a large measure these concentrated magnificences and sublimated palaces of ease are the abiding-places of Western men who have learned, by their own exertions and achievements, what a man ought to have if he pays enough for it. The electric street-railway starts out here and goes East when the old horse-car "plant" has been destroyed. The electric light does its police-work and illumines the pathway to the church and the lyceum in the Middle West before its beams—if you can call them beams—are thrown into Eastern purlieus. It may be that some Eastern town, or several Eastern towns, actually began the use of these comforts, but they were first general in the Middle West, as were the telephone and other devices which lighten, or completely perform, the necessary drudgeries of life. It is in this stretch of country that we find the most luxurious trains on the railroad, and here we find the stenographer introduced to the traveller to allure him from the "library" and from the scenery to the weary tasks of life.