Revisiting the Earth

by James Langdon Hill

Some newly revealed sources of wealth were uncovered, and the city received her crown. More new men with high grade mechanical skill came to be employed in the electric-light works than there were in Xenophon's famous army. A rare opportunity came and she did that which is rarely done. Some cities are famous for one thing. Kansas City for beef, Chicago for modesty, Hartford for insurance, Milwaukee for beer, Atlantic City for Board-walks, and Lynn for her new Boulevard to Nahant and Swampscott. After a North-Easter, particularly on a high full tide, when the spray is thrown over the tops of the telephone poles, the sight is exhilarating. There is education in contact with affairs. The place came to be the home of a capacious department-school of the mechanical arts, and of the latest and most popular of all the sciences. Her graduates filtered out into all the land. The situation was peculiar. There were sounds in the air like the cracking of the ice, at the incoming of spring, to prove to everybody that the Labor Movement was on the way unlike the ice which forms at the bottom and rises to the top. The Labor Movement was organized from the top downward, rather than from the bottom up. The reformers felt a disposition to criticize existing conditions. The custom prevailed of saying things derogatory to the place. Then came a rather general practice of habitually decrying one's town. Now there are two or three curious things about this habit of disliking one's own town. One of them is that this vice seems to coexist in human nature with even an intense degree of patriotism. Persons who are second to none in love of country are among those who will permit themselves to speak sneeringly of their particular town. Another amazing fact about this evil habit is its prevalence. Max O'Rell has noted that if you wish to hear some criticism of America you have only to go to Boston. Persons, who have ever lived in the country, are sure that their particular village is the worst place for gossip on the globe, and as if this were not dispraise enough, they will refer to their native towns as "dead and alive" places, or make some allusion to their having "gone to seed," or prove to you that the best families have moved elsewhere, or will apply the epithets "sleepy," "deserted," "God-forsaken," or else they will sum up their villifications in a single expression and style, for short, their native place as a "one-horse-town," and express thankfulness that there are so many roads by which any one can leave it. We all wish to be delivered from a man who so far from developing what I will call place-pride, does not speak well of his own folks. I know of a dog, that is said never to bark except at his own folks. The graduate of a college, on entering politics is often deprived of his rightful influence, by the popular feeling, that he feels called upon only to criticise. But the further peculiarity of the habit of which I am speaking is that it works on without discrimination. It involves some places that are entitled to exception.

Money in all Pockets

I had heard that money talked, but in this place it walked. It went up and down the streets. I used to be amazed at the amount of money that was out of doors. The plenitude of money, especially among young people, astonished me. I had seen money after harvest, "When the ship comes in," but here the young men and women were paid every week, and seemed to have their money right where they could lay their hands upon it. I had come from a place where people were well clothed, but here, it was different, they were well dressed. There were no slums, no streets of squalor. No quarters given over to the submerged tenth, to the socially non-elect. There were a few improvident, impoverished or really unfortunate families. One philanthropist drew the line on helping any family that showed intemperance or kept a dog.

The Oratorio Society, the far-famed choirs, with a master of assemblies, more than a captain, a host in himself developing enthusiasm in vocal music in the public schools, privately employed to visit Sunday-schools to get everybody to sing, not only had a great influence in the city, they had too much. They were exclusive, they smothered the lyceum, displaced the lecture, hushed elocution.

I used to complain publicly that the other arts did not get their hearing.

The Wine of Sweet Remembrance

As anyone who has lived in the past is expected to utter a wail that the former days were better than these, I will be true to type and say plainly that, nature being originally so profuse in her gifts, I greatly miss the glorious gardens of an earlier day. Blossom Street and Vine Street and Cherry Street tell, by their names, their own story: and the tall ranks of the dahlias and the color of the azaleas, still sometimes seen in miniature kindergartens, faintly indicate the early glories of the place.

In the good old times we had our sunken gardens. Their surface was often lower than the grade of the streets, and this low rich soil of deep alluvium had a perfect fury of productiveness.

So, too, in constructing their earliest House of Prayer, the oldest Congregational Church in the world[3] that stands on its original ground, for warmth, not having stoves, they adopted the policy, like the Germans, of digging themselves in, and laid the sills of their meeting-house three feet under ground. As they advanced they were children of fortune in the style and architecture of many of their public buildings.

The City Hall, in the period in which it was built, at the close of the Civil War, was a gem. When I have seen some of the monstrosities worked off on some of our cities and towns, made hideous under the guise of architecture, with churches that in design seemed studied insults to the Deity, I have repeatedly told the builders the exact amount of the fare to this city where they could at least get their ideas up, obtain a vision and gain a conception of what a building might become.