If Thessaly had had the time and inclination for a serious study of itself, this decadence of the object of its former pride might have awakened some regret. The seminary, which had been one of the first in the land to open its doors to both sexes, had borne an honorable part in the great agitation against slavery that preceded the war. Some of its professors had been distinguished abolitionists—of the kind who strove, suffered, and made sacrifices when the cause was still unpopular, yet somehow fell or were edged out of public view once the cause had triumphed and there were rewards to be distributed, and they had taken the sentiment of the village with them in those old days. Then there was a steady demand upon the seminary library, which was open to householders of the village, for good books. Then there was maintained each winter a lecture course, which was able, not so much by money as by the weight and character of its habitual patrons, to enrich its annual lists with such names as Emerson, Burritt, Phillips, Curtis, and Beecher. At this time had occurred the most sensational episode in the history of the village—when the rumor spread that a runaway negro was secreted somewhere about the seminary buildings, and a pro-slavery crowd came over from Tyre to have him out and to vindicate upon the persons of his protectors the outraged majesty of the Fugitive Slave law, and the citizens of Thessaly rose and chased back the invaders with celerity and emphasis.
But all this had happened so long ago that it was only vaguely remembered now. There were those who still liked to recall those days and to tell stories about them, but they had only themselves for listeners. The new Thessaly was not precisely intolerant of the history of this ante-bellum period, but it had fresher and more important matters to think of; and its customary comment upon these legends of the slow, one-horse past was, “Things have changed a good deal since then,” offered with a smile of distinct satisfaction.
Yes, things had changed. Stephen Minster’s enterprise in opening up the iron fields out at Juno, and in building the big smelting-works on the outskirts of Thessaly, had altered everything. The branch road to the coal district which he called into existence lifted the village at once into prominence as a manufacturing site. Other factories were erected for the making of buttons, shoes, Scotch-caps, pasteboard boxes, matches, and a number of varieties of cotton cloths. When this last industry appeared in the midst of them, the people of Thessaly found their heads fairly turned. To be lords of iron and cotton both!
This period of industrial progress, of which I speak with, I hope, becoming respect and pride, had now lasted some dozen years, and, so far from showing signs of interruption, there were under discussion four or five new projects for additional trades to be started in the village, which would be decided upon by the time the snow was off the ground. During these years, Thessaly had more than quadrupled its population, which was now supposed to approximate thirteen thousand, and might be even more. There had been considerable talk for the past year or two about getting a charter as a city from the legislature, and undoubtedly this would soon be done. About this step there were, however, certain difficulties, more clearly felt than expressed. Not even those who were most exultant over Thessaly’s splendid advance in wealth and activity were blind to sundry facts written on the other side of the ledger.
Thessaly had now some two thousand voters, of whom perhaps two-fifths had been born in Europe. It had a saloon for every three hundred and fifty inhabitants, and there was an uneasy sense of connection between these two facts which gave rise to awkward thoughts. The village was fairly well managed by its trustees; the electorate insisted upon nothing save that they should grant licenses liberally, and, this apart, their government did not leave much to be desired. But how would it be when the municipal honors were taken on, when mayor, aider-men and all the other officers of the new city, with enlarged powers of expenditure and legislation, should be voted for? Whenever the responsible business men of Thessaly allowed their minds to dwell upon a forecast of what this board of aldermen would probably be like, they frankly owned to themselves that the prospect was not inviting. But as a rule they did not say so, and the village was drifting citywards on a flowing tide.
It was just before Christmas that Reuben Tracy took the first step toward realizing his dream of making this Thessaly a better place than it was. Fourteen citizens, all more or less intimate friends of his, assembled at his office one evening, and devoted some hours to listening to and discussing his plans.
An embarrassment arose almost at the outset through the discovery that five or six of the men present thought Thessaly was getting on very well as it was, and had assumed that the meeting was called for the purpose of arranging a citizens’ movement to run the coming spring elections for trustees in the interest of good government—by which they of course understood that they were to be asked to take office. The exposure of this mistake threatened for a little time to wreck the purpose of the gathering. Mr. Jones, a gentleman who made matches, or rather had just taken a handsome sum from the great Ruby Loco-foco Trust as his reward for ceasing to manufacture them, was especially disposed to resent what Reuben said about the moral and material state of the village. He insisted that it was the busiest and most progressive town in that whole section of the State; it had six streets well paved, was lighted with gas, had no disorderly houses to speak of, and turned out an annual production of manufactures worth two and a half times as much as the industrial output of any other place of its size in the State. He had the figures at his tongue’s end, and when he finished with a spirited sentence about being proud of his native town, and about birds fouling their own nests, it looked as if he had the sense of the little assemblage with him.
Reuben Tracy found it somewhat difficult to reply to an unexpected attack of this nature. He was forced to admit the truth of everything his critic had said, and then to attempt once more to show why these things were not enough. Father Chance, the Catholic priest, a broad-shouldered, athletic young man, who preached very commonplace sermons but did an enormous amount of pastoral work, took up the speaking, and showed that his mind ran mainly upon the importance of promoting total abstinence. John Fairchild, the editor and owner of Thessaly’s solitary daily paper, a candid and warmhearted man, whose heterodoxy on the tariff question gave concern to the business men of the place, but whose journal was honest and popular, next explained what his views were, and succeeded in precipitating, by some chance remark, a long, rambling, and irrelevant debate on the merits of protection and the proper relations between capital and labor. To illustrate his position on these subjects, and on the general question of Thessaly’s condition, Mr. Burdick, the cashier of the Dearborn County Bank, next related how he was originally opposed to the Bland Silver bill, and detailed the mental processes by which his opinion had finally become reversed. The Rev. Dr. Turner, the rector of St. Matthew’s, a mildly paternal gentleman, who seemed chiefly occupied by the thought that he was in the same room with a Catholic priest, tentatively suggested a bazaar, with ladies and the wives of workingmen mingled together on the committee, and smiled and coughed confusedly when this idea was received in absolute silence.
It was Dr. Lester, a young physician who had moved into the village only a few years before, but was already its leading medical authority, who broke this silence by saying, with a glance which, slowly circling the room, finally rested on Reuben Tracy: “All this does not help us. Our views on all sorts of matters are interesting, no doubt, but they are not vital just now. The question is not so much why you propose something, but what do you propose?”