Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/66

56 This Middle West, to continue for a moment on the materialistic side of the subject, is the natural distributer of the country, and it is in the way of vindicating the expectation of those whose conjectures are called prophecies that some day Chicago will be bigger than New York. As railroads have driven river-freighting and river passenger service, except for pleasure, largely out of business, the cities called railroad centres have increased in population and productiveness.

The market of the great commerce of the country is what we must call this Middle West. It is the centre of the enormous energies where exchange takes place; it is the centre of the largest commerce of the continent, the busy expanse where the products of the entire world are bought, and where are sold the products of the land on which the food of this people and most of the food of Europe are grown and raised. It has its own great ocean, more crowded than any other water in the world—no longer with the white sails, but with the white steam (and the black smoke) of commerce. Through these waters one may sail a thousand miles in ships which rival the transatlantic liners in their stores of luxury, and which equal the trains that delight the sense of success that is the rightful joy of these sons of American pioneers. There are not so many ships as trains in these days and in these parts. Only those go by water who do not care when they get to their journey's end, to their summer's outing in the "old home," or to their sports among the lakes of Wisconsin or Minnesota, charged to the brim with fish, or to their shooting on the remoter plains or in the still farther mountains. Going to the "old home" for recreation is now a game that two can play at. The old home in the East still calls to the sons and daughters in the Middle West, but also is it true that the Middle West is old enough to possess established domestic shrines of its own, and there are annual summer and autumn gatherings there of the children who have gone back to the earliest shrine to dwell permanently amid the luxuries of the older civilization—for it is the fashion to speak thus of an older civilization, although our country is still so new that it is really absurd to speak of one thing, or of one class in it, as older than any other American thing or American class. Possibly it would be more nearly correct to say that there are a little larger variety and a greater abundance in the East than in the inner parts of the country of opportunities which men and women of leisure enjoy. At all events, pilgrims now go to the domestic shrines in the Middle West for the annual vacation, even for the Thanksgiving turkey, in numbers that excel those of the pilgrims who used to go eastward on such occasions in the earlier day—for the reason, perhaps, that the serious pioneers of that time were too busy to take vacations. It is even true to-day of the busy man of this central market-place that a doctor's warning is too often the necessary condition precedent to a belated hunt after enjoyment.

As one passes through these lakes, taking pleasure in the very wideness of their waters as well as in the panorama of scenery which is the distinctive feature of every considerable journey in this favored land, one sees not only the monuments of splendid energy, but, struggling through the necessary grime of successful work, of beneficent achievement. One sees too the joyful spirit of recreation, and the material evidences of that intense determination to make the most of the mind and spirit which is such a beautiful sign of the American, notably in the homes of the second and third and fourth generations of the English people who settled in the old Atlantic fringe in the seventeenth century.

I am not losing sight of the mingling of other people with the children of our earliest immigrants. It is an agreeable mixture where there is a mixture, although the lines of social demarcation are visible even in the second generation. This is true of the Germans, for example, who make up so large a part of the population of some of those States which, together, constituted that proud earliest general territory that once belonged to the Eastern colonies (Eastern, Middle, and Southern, let me hasten to say, in order that I may avoid sectional controversy), and which was the first part of our land in which the freedom of all men was declared by law. The Germans have their quarter "across the