Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/69

Rh the hostess, and the host stands appropriately behind her. She is the instructed, and leads the intellectual movements of her town. The book club, the Dante club, the entertainer of the lecturing or the travelling lion, is the woman. Often the clergyman assists; but she, through her influence over the surrendered man, has selected the clergyman, and on her he must count for the success of himself and of his work. She is, indeed, generous and gracious, and welcomes with joy every man who strays from business into the company of books and pictures, into homes which she has made. They call their houses homes, oftener than the East, and these homes bespeak the finer taste of the woman. Her education is likely to be more virile than that of her Eastern sisters, because it is acquired at schools and colleges where coeducation of the sexes is the rule. It is like in essence, very different in kind and in degree, to the mental training of the soft-voiced women of the Old South, who were accustomed to read Burke and Bolingbroke and Hume, with the more ancient classics, to their fathers. Her domination in the home and her primacy in the higher life, as we are inclined to call it, are seen not only in the more obvious social affairs, but in the element of seriousness which marks most life in this midway of the country.

As the man pays her high respect by recognizing her superiority in the kingdom of taste, of feeling, of the imagination, of the knowledge which comes from books, she returns his deference by venerating him as the active ruler of the world of affairs. When the man in the Middle West is ready to seek intellectual repose from the business in which he has laid up, or is laying up, his fortune, he is likely to go into politics. Whether he is business man or politician, she who is queen at home is subject when the king is at his desk or in the capital. She is the cheering partner of his toils, who knows nothing of the hardships or of the deviousness of his way, but who is lost in the glory of his successes. To the hard and critical world he may be as bad as politicians can be, but she is content to accept him at his own valuation, and to feel in him, or his career, the confidence which he feels for her as mistress of the home. If he is obedient to her conception of all that constitutes the duty of husband, son, father, and brother, no evil whisper can disturb her faith in him. The model man at home is safe, with his womenfolk, against all the slanders and assaults of rival partisans or of competitors without. This attitude was well expressed by a young woman student in one of the great coeducation universities of the West. She was asked to write her view of Thomas Jefferson, and this was her response: "Thomas Jefferson was timid and sly, but lovely in his family." She could judge him as one of the "world of men," because she was not of his family; if she had been, the last part of her description alone would have sufficed.

This Middle West is the heart of the country. It has its faults, but it has many and noble virtues. Like most middle things, it produces the average. It is safe and wholesome; if it were not, the whole body would be corrupt. Probably in political things we may wish an improvement, but politics is one of the crude occupations of men, and here, as elsewhere, we must judge of men and women by other tests. Judged by those tests, the Middle West is a fine tribute to our race and to democracy. It is the custom to read democracy through the spectacles of the man who gathers news to sell over his counter, and who wants the largest possible return for his outlay. Therefore we hear that democracy is vulgar; but when that charge is made, the one who makes it really means that democracy is not reticent,—that its daily press, for instance, recounts the lives of the multitude who walk out of our ordinary paths, and that it spreads abroad the more obnoxious qualities of the class whose members in other countries—in France especially—are concealed behind the screen of manners, of traditions, which afford a seclusion dear to an old and established society, but which are not desired by those abounding with the joy of the new country conquered, and with the love of their follows who have fought up, or who are fighting up, with them. No one need feel shame of democracy at the very heart of the very heart of our country.