Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada

by Charles Dudley Warner

Springfield, which spreads its 30,000 people extensively over a plain on the Sangamon River, is prosperous, and in the season when any place can be agreeable, a beautiful city. The elm grows well in the rich soil, and its many broad, well-shaded streets, with pretty detached houses and lawns, make it very attractive, a delightful rural capital. The large Illinois towns are slowly lifting themselves out of the slough of rich streets, better adapted to crops than to trade; though good material for pavement is nowhere abundant. Springfield has recently improved its condition by paving, mostly with cedar blocks, twenty-five miles of streets. I notice that in some of the Western towns tile pavement is being tried. Manufacturing is increasing—there is a prosperous rolling-mill and a successful watch factory—but the overwhelming interest of the city is that it is the centre of the political and educational institutions—of the life emanating from the State-honse.

The State-house is, I believe, famous. It is a big building, a great deal has been spent on it in the way of ornamentation, and it enjoys the distinction of the highest State-honse dome in the country—350 feet. It has the merit also of being well placed on an elevation, and its rooms are spacious and very well planned. It is an incongruous pile externally, mixing many styles of architecture, placing Corinthian capitals on Doric columns, and generally losing the impression of a dignified mass in details. Within, it is especially rich in wall-casings of beautiful and variegated marbles, each panel exquisite, but all together tending to dissipate any idea of unity of design or simplicity. Nothing whatever can be said for many of the scenes in relief, or the mural paintings (except that they illustrate the history of the State), nor for most of the statues in the corridors, but the decoration of the chief rooms, in mingling of colors and material, is frankly barbarous.

Illinois has the reputation of being slow in matters of education and reform. A day in the State offices, however, will give the visitor an impression of intelligence and vigor in these directions. The office of the State Board of Pharmacy in the Capitol shows a strict enforcement of the law in the supervision of drugs and druggists. Prison management has also most intelligent consideration. The two great penitentiaries, the Southern, at Chester (with about 800 convicts), and the Northern, at Joliet (with about 1600 convicts), call for no special comment. The one at Joliet is a model of its kind, with a large library, and such schooling as is practicable in the system, and is well administered; and I am glad to see that Mr. McClaughry, the warden, believes that incorrigibles should be permanently held, and that grading, the discipline of labor and education, with a parole system, can make law-abiding citizens of many convicts.

In school education the State is certainly not supine in efforts. Out of a State population of about 8,500,000, there were, in 1887, 1,627,841 under twenty-one years, and 1,096,464 between the ages of six and twenty-one. The school age for free attendance is from six to twenty-one; for compulsory attendance, from eight to fourteen. There were 749,994 children enrolled, and 500,197 in daily attendance. Those enrolled in private schools numbered 87,725. There were 2258 teachers in private schools, and 22,925 in public schools; of this latter, 7402 were men and 15,403 women. The average monthly salary of men was $51.48, and of women $42.17. The sum available for school purposes in 1887 was $12,890,515, in an assessed value of taxable property of $797,752,888. These figures are from Dr. X. W. Edwards, Superintendent of Public Instruction, whose energy is felt In every part of the State.

The State prides itself on its institutions of charity. I saw some of them at Jacksonville, an hour’s ride west of Springfield. Jacksonville is a very pretty city of some 15,000, with elm-shaded avenues that crest but do not rival New Haven—one of those intellectual centres that are a continual surprise to our English friends in their bewildered exploration of our monotonous land. In being the Western centre of Platonic philosophy, it is more like Concord than like New Haven. It is the home of a large number of people who have travelled, who give intelligent attention to art, to literary study in small societies and clubs—its Monday Evening Club of men long antedated most of the similar institutions at the East—and to social problems. I certainly did not expect to find, as I did, water-colors by Turner in Jacksonville, besides many other evidences of a culture that must modify many Eastern ideas of what the West is and is getting to be.

The Illinois College is at Jacksonville. It is one of twenty-five small colleges in the State, and I believe the only one that adheres to the old curriculum, and does not adopt co-education. It has about sixty students in the college proper, and about one hundred and thirty in the preparatory academy. Most of the Illinois colleges have preparatory departments, and so long as they do, and the various sects scatter their energies among so many institutions, the youth of the State who wish a higher education will be obliged to go East. The school perhaps the most vigorous just now is the University of Illinois, at Urbana, a school of agriculture and applied science mainly. The Central Hospital for the Insane (one of three in the State), under the superintendence of Dr. Henry F. Carriel, is a fine establishment, a model of neatness and good management, with over nine hundred patients, about a third of whom do some light work on the farm or in the house. A large conservatory of plants and flowers is rightly regarded as a remedial agency in the treatment of the patients. Here also is a fine school for the education of the blind.

The Institution for the Education of Deaf-Mutes, Dr. Philip H. Gillette, superintendent, is, I believe, the largest in the world, and certainly one of the most thoroughly equipped and successful in its purposes. It has between five hundred and six hundred pupils. All the departments found in many other institutions are united here. The school has a manual training department; articulation is taught; the art school exhibits surprising results in aptitude for both drawing and painting; and industries are taught to the extent of giving every pupil a trade or some means of support—shoemaking, cabinet-making, printing, sewing, gardening, and baking.

Such an institution as this raises many interesting questions. It is at once evident that the loss of the sense of hearing has an effect on character, moral and intellectual. Whatever may be the education of the deaf-mute, he will remain, in some essential and not easily to be characterized respects, different from other people. It is exceedingly hard to cultivate in them a spirit of self-dependence, or eradicate the notion that society owes them perpetual care and support. The education of deaf-mutes, and the teaching them trades, so that they become intelligent and productive members of society, of course induce marriages among them. Is not this calculated to increase the number of deaf-mutes? Dr. Gillette thinks not. The vital statistics show that consanguineous marriages are a large factor in deaf-muteism; about ten per cent., it is estimated, of the deaf-mutes are the offspring of parents related by blood. Ancestral defects are not always perpetuated in kind; they may descend in physical deformity, in deafness, in imbecility. Deafness is more apt to descend in collateral branches than in a straight line. It is a striking fact in a table of relationships prepared by Dr. Gillette that, while the 450 deaf-mutes enumerated had 770 relationships to other deaf-mutes, making a total of 1220, only twelve of them had deaf-mute parents, and only two of them one deaf-mute parent, the mother of these having been able to hear, and that in no case was the mother alone a deaf-mute. Of the pupils who have left this institution, 251 have married deaf-mutes, and 19 hearing persons. These marriages have been as fruitful as the average, and among them all only sixteen have deaf-mute children; in some of the families having a deaf child there are other children who hear. These facts, says the report, clearly indicate that the probability of deaf offspring from deaf parentage is remote, while other facts may clearly indicate that a deaf person probably has or will have a deaf relation other than a child.

Springfield is old enough to have a historic flavor and social traditions; perhaps it might be called a Kentucky flavor, so largely did settlers from Kentucky determine it. There was a leisurely element in it, and it produced a large number of men prominent in politics and in the law, and women celebrated for beauty and spirit. It was a hospitable society, with a certain tone of “family” that distinguished it from other frontier places, a great liking for the telling of racy stories, and a hearty enjoyment of life. The State has provided a Gubernatorial residence which is at once spacious and pleasant, and is a mansion, with its present occupants, typical in a way of the old regime and of modern culture.

To the country at large Springfield is distinguished as the home of Abraham Lincoln to an extent perhaps not fully realized by the residents of the growing capital, with its ever new interests. And I was perhaps unreasonably disappointed in not finding that sense of his personality that I expected. It is, indeed, emphasized by statues in the Capitol and by the great mausoleum in the cemetery—an imposing structure, with an excellent statue in bronze, and four groups, relating to the civil war, of uncommon merit. But this great monumental show does not satisfy the personal longing of which I speak. Nor is the Lincoln residence much more satisfactory in this respect. The plain two-story wooden house has been presented to the State by his son Robert, and is in charge of a custodian. And although the parlor is made a show-room and full of memorials, there is no atmosphere of the man about it. On Lincoln’s departure for Washington the furniture was sold and the house rented, never to be again occupied by him. There is here nothing of that personal presence that clings to the Hermitage, to Marshfield, to Mount Vernon, to Monticello. Lincoln was given to the nation, and—a frequent occurrence in our uprooting business life—the home disappeared. Lincoln was honored and beloved in Springfield as a man, but perhaps some of the feeling towards him as a party leader still lingers, although it has disappeared almost everywhere else in the country. Nowhere else was the personal partisanship hotter than in this city, and it is hardly to be expected that political foes in this generation should quite comprehend the elevation of Lincoln, in the consenting opinion of the world, among the greatest characters of all ages. It has happened to Lincoln that every year and a more intimate knowledge of his character have added to his fame and to the appreciation of his moral grandeur. There is a natural desire to go to some spot pre-eminently sacred to his personality. This may be his birthplace. At any rate, it is likely that before many years Kentucky will be proud to distinguish in some way the spot where the life began of the most illustrious man born in its borders.