Ancientness is Falling Off
I have attributed a remarkable escape, speaking broadly, from such deformities, such travesties on the grace of architecture, the least developed of the arts, that with pain we are forced to contemplate, to the fact that this city is conspicuously a place of the people and they will not stand for cranky, crazy fads and obsessions. At any hour for forty years, a stranger to fear, with absolute confidence I could point to buildings that it would be well enough to call perfect of their kind. Once it would have been tolerable at a great Public Fair to exhibit inventions, wares, and products under a rough shed; but public taste has so advanced that at a World's Fair nothing less than a palace meets the general expectation. On revisiting the earth, one awakens to the fact that business organizations have set out to have buildings that are not only commodious and suitable but they must be attractive and interesting.
The same fact is apparent in the evolution of railway architecture when buildings must be pleasing as well as useful.
"Stray Historical Facts Corralled"
This city did not happen. She adopted the policy of faith, and made others believe in her because she believed in herself. She has attended strictly to business, and has come to hold twice as many people as the fourth largest state in the Union. In point of population, she is as much entitled to an exclusive Congressman and to two United States Senators as a state that is larger than New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland combined. Or to use a better measure, she exceeds in population one of the states that would overlay all New England. For my work, no better place could have been found beneath the all-beholding sun than this fair, expansive city, on its crescent bay, with its shore drive where the Indians once held their running matches, which has now become one of the boulevards of the world. Like the apple trees in an old New England orchard, the men were marked by individuality. They were fruitful, needed, prized, each had a place, but they were so different in the way they stood up. There were active men, gifted in speech, who had the training that came out of the old Lyceum and the Silsbee Street Debating Society. Oxford Street Chapel, the home of a sort of free-for-all religion, became a general receiver for all these organizations and for reformatory work generally and eloquence was dog-cheap. I have no doubt that many of these men are dead, but they are alive to me. I see them as of old. To me they live in the same houses and have the same peculiarities, and carry, on them, the same years that they then wore.
The By-products of Development
As I had been mixed up for some time with a professional set, I used to sit in mute surprise to see such men, knowing the value of things, with practised minds, devoting themselves to business life rather than the old time professions, to the arts rather than to the sciences. Some of these men had mental endowment enough to be physicians or Judges in Court, but they devoted their fine minds to manufacturing. Some of them, undoubtedly of great ability, did not deem themselves too good for business or for the world. Men speak of conducting a business, but you can not conduct a thing that is not moving, any more than a pilot can steer a boat that is lying still, although I suppose it is possible to conduct a vehicle when it is headed for the cemetery. They were just suited to the times, and to the place, and to the task, and each one seemed to contribute an individual part in making the city the world's great shoe centre. Some men were strong at home, others were good advertisers and solicitors and did work in the field from which all the manufacturers benefited, whose manner of life need not be changed if the Millennium had already come. For straight-forward, right-minded, high-principled men, who keep their word, and keep the faith, I am bold enough to invite the test, laid down in the inspired volume, which the great patriarch met with such intense concern. First came the overture that disaster should be averted from an imperiled city if fifty creditable men should be found in it. He felt some misgiving about finding fifty and entreated that the number be reduced to forty-five and then that he be answerable for finding only forty, then thirty, then twenty, then ten. I believe that if any one there were answering for that place during the Golden Age, he could not only begin with the smallest required number, ten, but that he could go up through the schedule and find twenty, thirty, forty, forty-five, and fifty.
[1] Page 104.
[2] See Harper's Cyclopedia, p. 390, and The Book of Berkshire, p. 30.