Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada

by Charles Dudley Warner

I had conceived of Columbus as a rural capital, pleasant and slow, rather a village than a city. I was surprised to find a city of 80,000 people, growing with a rapidity astonishing even for a Western town, with miles of prosperous business blocks (High Street is four miles long), and wide avenues of residences extending to suburban parks. Broad Street, with its four rows of trees and fine houses and beautiful lawns, is one of the handsomest avenues in the country, and it is only one of many that are attractive. The Capitol Square, with several good buildings about it, makes an agreeable centre of the city. Of the Capitol building not much is to be said. The exterior is not wholly bad, but it is surmounted by a truncated something that is neither a dome nor a revolving turret, and the interior is badly arranged for room, light, and ventilation. Space is wasted, and many of the rooms, among them the relic-room and the flag-room, are inconvenient and almost inaccessible. The best is the room of the Supreme Court, which has attached a large law library. The general State Library contains about 54,000 volumes, with a fair but not large proportion of Western history.

Columbus is a city of churches, of very fine public schools, of many clubs, literary and social, in which the intellectual element predominates, and of an intelligent, refined, and most hospitable society. Here one may study the educational and charitable institutions of the State, many of the more important of which are in the city, and also the politics. It was Ohio’s hard fate to be for many years an “October State,” and the battle-field and corruption-field of many outside influences. This no doubt demoralized the politics of the State, and lowered the tone of public morality. With the removal of the cause of this decline, I believe the tone is being raised. Recent trials for election frauds, and the rehabilitation of the Cincinnati police, show that a better spirit prevails.

Ohio is growing in wealth as it is in population, and is in many directions an ambitious and progressive State. Judged by its institutions of benevolence and of economies, it is a leading State. No other State provides more liberally for its unfortunates, in asylums for the insane, the blind, the deaf-mutes, the idiotic, the young waifs and strays, nor shows a more intelligent comprehension of the legitimate functions of a great commonwealth, in the creation of boards of education and of charities and of health, in a State inspection of workshops and factories, in establishing bureaus of meteorology and of forestry, a fish commission, and an agricultural experiment station. The State has thirty-four colleges and universities, a public-school system which has abolished distinctions of color, and which by the reports is as efficient as any in the Union. Cincinnati, the moral tone of which, the Ohio people say, is not fairly represented by its newspapers, is famous the world over for its cultivation in music and its progress in the fine and industrial arts. It would be possible for a State to have and be all this and yet rise in the general scale of civilization only to a splendid mediocrity, without the higher institutions of pure learning, and without a very high standard of public morality. Ohio is in no less danger of materialism, with all its diffused intelligence, than other States. There is a recognizable limit to what a diffused level of education, say in thirty-four colleges, can do for the higher life of a State. I heard an address in the Capitol by ex-President Hayes on the expediency of adding a manual-training school to the Ohio State University at Columbus. The comment of some of the legislators on it was that we have altogether too much book-learning; what we need is workshops in our schools and colleges. It seems to a stranger that whatever first-class industrial and technical schools Ohio needs, it needs more the higher education, and the teaching of philosophy, logic, and ethics. In 1886 Governor Foraker sent a special message to the Legislature pointing out the fact that notwithstanding the increase of wealth in the State, the revenue was inadequate to the expenditure, principally by reason of the undervaluation of taxable property (there being a yearly decline in the reported value of personal property), and a fraudulent evasion of taxes. There must have been a wide insensibility to the wrong of cheating the State to have produced this state of things, and one cannot but think that it went along with the low political tone before mentioned. Of course Ohio is not a solitary sinner among States in this evasion of duty, but she helps to point the moral that the higher life of a State needs a great deal of education that is neither commercial nor industrial nor simply philanthropic.

It is impossible and unnecessary for the purposes of this paper to speak of many of the public institutions of the State, even of those in the city. But educators everywhere may study with profit the management of the public schools under the City Board of Education, of which Mr. R. W. Stevenson is superintendent. The High-school, of over 600 pupils, is especially to be commended. Manual training is not introduced into the schools, and the present better sentiment is against it; but its foundation, drawing, is thoroughly taught from the primaries up to the High-school, and the exhibits of the work of the schools of all grades in modelling, drawing, and form and color studies, which were made last year in New York and Chicago, gave these Columbus schools a very high rank in the country. Any visitor to them must be impressed with the intelligence of the methods employed, the apprehension of modern notions, and also the conservative spirit of common-sense.

The Ohio State University has an endowment from the State of over half a million dollars, and a source of ultimate wealth in its great farm and grounds, which must Increase in value as the city extends. It is a very well equipped institution for the study of the natural sciences and agriculture, and might easily be built up into a university in all departments, worthy of the State. At present it has 335 students, of whom 150 are in the academic department, 41 in special practical courses, and 143 in the preparatory school. All the students are organized in companies, under an officer of the United States, for military discipline; the uniform, the drill, the lessons of order and obedience, are invaluable in the transforming of carriage and manners. The University has a museum of geology which ranks among the important ones of the country. It is a pity that a consolidation of other State institutions with this cannot be brought about.

The Ohio Penitentiary at Columbus is an old building, not in keeping with the modern notions of prison construction. In 1887 it had about 1300 convicts, some 100 less than in the preceding year. The management is subject to political changes, and its officers have to be taken from various parts of the State at the dictation of political workers. Under this system the best management is liable to be upset by an election. The special interest in the prison at this time was in the observation of the working of the Parole Law. Since the passage of the Act in May, 1885, 283 prisoners have been paroled, and while several of the convicts have been returned for a violation of parole, nearly the whole number are reported as law-abiding citizens. The managers are exceedingly pleased with the working of the law; it promotes good conduct in the prison, and reduces the number in confinement. The reduction of the number of convicts in 1887 from the former year was ascribed partially to the passage of the General Sentence Law in 1884, and the Habitual Crimes Act in 1885. The criminals dread these laws, the first because it gives no fixed time to build their hopes upon, but all depends upon their previous record and good conduct in prison, while the latter affects the incorrigible, who are careful to shun the State after being convicted twice, and avoid imprisonment for life. The success of these laws and the condition of the State finances delay the work on the Intermediate Prison, or Reformatory, begun at Mansfield. This Reformatory is intended for first offenders, and has the distinct purpose of prevention of further deterioration, and of reformation by means of the discipline of education and labor. The success of the tentative laws in this direction, as applied to the general prisons, is, in fact, a strong argument for the carrying out of the Mansfield scheme.

There cannot be a more interesting study of the “misfits” of humanity than that offered in the Institution for Feeble-minded Youth, under the superintendence of Dr. G. A. Doren. Here are 715 imbeciles in all stages of development from absolute mental and physical incapacity. There is scarcely a problem that exists in education, in the relation of the body and mind, in the inheritance of mental and physical traits, in regard to the responsibility for crime, in psychology or physiology, that is not here illustrated. It is the intention of the school to teach the idiot child some trade or occupation that will make him to some degree useful, and to carry him no further than the common branches in learning. The first impression, I think, made upon a visitor is the almost invariable physical deformity that attends imbecility—ill-proportioned, distorted bodies, dwarfed, misshapen gelatinoids, with bones that have no stiffness. The next impression is the preponderance of the animal nature, the persistence of the lower passions, and the absence of moral qualities in the general immaturity. And perhaps the next impression is of the extraordinary effect that physical training has in awakening the mind, and how soon the discipline of the institution creates the power of self-control. From almost blank imbecility and utter lack of self-restraint the majority of these children, as we saw them in their schoolrooms and workshops, exhibited a sense of order, of entire decency, and very considerable intelligence. It was demonstrated that most imbeciles are capable of acquiring the rudiments of an education and of learning some useful occupation. Some of the boys work on the farm, others learn trades. The boys in the shoe-shop were making shoes of excellent finish. The girls do plain sewing and house-work apparently almost as well as girls of their age outside. Two or three things that we saw may be mentioned to show the scope of the very able management and the capacities of the pupils. There was a drill of half a hundred boys and girls in the dumb-bell exercise, to music, under the leadership of a pupil, which in time, grace, and exact execution of complicated movements would have done credit to any school. The institution has two bands, one of brass and one of strings, which perform very well. The string band played for dancing in the large amusement hall. Several hundred children were on the floor dancing cotillons, and they went through the variety of changes not only in perfect time and decorum, but without any leader to call the figures. It would have been a remarkable performance for any children. There were many individual cases of great and deplorable interest. Cretins, it was formerly supposed, were only born in mountainous regions. There are three here born in Ohio. There were five imbeciles of what I should call the ape type, all of one Ohio family. Two of them were the boys exhibited some years ago by Barnum as the Aztec children—the last of an extinct race. He exhibited them as a boy and a girl. When they had grown a little too large to show as children, or the public curiosity was satisfied about the extinct race, he exhibited them as wild Australians.

The humanity of so training these imbeciles that they can have some enjoyment of life, and be occasionally of some use to their relations, is undeniable. But since the State makes this effort in the survival of the unfittest, it must go further and provide a permanent home for them. The girls who have learned to read and write and sew and do house-work, and are of decent appearance, as many of them are, are apt to marry when they leave the institution. Their offspring are invariably idiots. I saw in this school the children of mothers who had been trained here. It is no more the intention of the State to increase the number of imbeciles than it is the number of criminals. Many of our charitable and penal institutions at present do both.

I should like to approach the subject of Natural Gas in a proper spirit, but I have neither the imagination nor the rhetoric to do justice to the expectations formed of it. In the restrained language of one of the inhabitants of Findlay, its people “have, caught the divine afflatus which came with the discovery of natural gas.” If Findlay had only natural gas, “she would be the peer, if not the superior, of any municipality on earth;” but she has much more, “and in all things has no equal or superior between the oceans and the lakes and the gulf, and is marching on to the grandest destiny ever prepared for any people, in any land, or in any period, since the morning stars first sang together, and the flowers in the garden of Eden budded and blossomed for man.” In fact, “this she has been doing in the past two years in the grandest and most satisfactory way, and that she will continue to progress is as certain as the stars that hold their midnight revel around the throne of Omnipotence.”

Notwithstanding this guarded announcement, it is evident that the discovery of natural gas has begun a revolution in fuel, which will have permanent and far-reaching economic and social consequences, whether the supply of gas is limited or inexhaustible.