THE first thing to be said about Cleveland is what, with the change of a pronoun, a Cambridge poet said about one of whom he wrote: "It is so pleasant." Its streets are pleasant to live in and to look upon; its parks are pleasant to stroll in or to ride in; its houses are, on the whole, pleasant to the æsthetic sense; its libraries are pleasant for their selectness though not for their bigness; its people are, above all, pleasant for their dignity, graciousness, genuineness, simplicity and appreciation. In the year 1838 the late Asa Gray spent a short time in Cleveland, and wrote from Cleveland to a friend, saying that the city would "ultimately be a very pleasant place"; he adds: "The people show some signs of civilization; they eat ice cream, which is sold in many places."[1] I wish I were able to assure my old friend and neighbor, as he now lives with the immortelles and other fadeless flowers, that he has proved to be a true prophet: Cleveland has become a "very pleasant place," and possibly I might be allowed to assure him that signs of the ice-age of modern civilization still linger.

In that relation in which men commonly use the word "pleasant," the weather, Cleveland is not pleasant. It has as much cloudy weather as almost any part of the world; and yet it has a pleasant climate. Its summers are not hot, its winters not cold. To the worker of any sort this pleasant climate of much unpleasant weather is very pleasing, for in it, as in the climate of London, one can get much work out of himself.

[VIEW IN GORDON PARK.]

Cleveland is a singular creation of contraries. It is an inland town, but it builds more vessels and owns more vessels than almost any other in the United States. About a quarter of all the steel vessels, rated in tonnage, built in the United States in the last fiscal year of the Government were constructed in Cleveland, the order of precedence being Cleveland, Newport News, Chicago, and Detroit; and almost three quarters of the modern steel ships in service on the Great Lakes are owned or operated by Cleveland vesselmen. It is a city of four hundred thousand people, but it impresses both the visitor and the resident as a big village or a series of big villages. From it can be reached in a long or short night's ride, New York and Chicago, Buffalo and St. Louis, Detroit and Cincinnati; within seven hundred miles of Cleveland dwell more than half the entire population of the country, and yet Cleveland has been called provincial. Its homes are among the most palatial of the world, but the owners of not a few are more at home in New York and Paris than on Euclid Avenue. It is distinguished for its iron, steel and coal interests, but it has scholars and teachers who are known where its steel rails have never been carried. It is a city of the East, and it is also a city of the West—of the East it is the newest, of the West it is the oldest. It is often called conservative, but it is also distinguished by its sense of power and of progress. It represents in its citizens a pure New England type; but it has also gathered up folks from all over the world,—"Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, ... strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians," who read their newspapers in a dozen different languages. But, be it said, the New England, the Connecticut and Massachusetts type still dominates. The names of the families which are most representative of the things of the spirit include a large number of New England names.

[CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, CLEVELAND.]

This city of contraries and of contrasts is yet made a great city by only one or two simple elements. One may say that Lake Erie makes Cleveland. Were there no Lake Erie there would be no Cleveland. But Lake Erie is the occasion and not the cause. One may say that the age of steel makes Cleveland. But that this age is the age of steel is only the condition, not the cause. The cause that makes Cleveland Cleveland is that at or near Cleveland the various elements that are necessary in the manufacture of iron and steel can be most economically and efficiently assembled. The iron ores from the Lake Superior region, the coal from the Massillon, Mohoning and Pennsylvania region, the limestone from the Lake Erie islands and southern shores, can here be most profitably brought together. Cleveland is, too, by rail and by boat a good point for the distribution of the finished product as well as a good point for the bringing together of the crude material. Here ore, coal and lime meet and mingle as naturally as the heat of the sun and the life of the seed unite in the springtime. Nothing can prevent their meeting, and little can subsidies or other artificial stimulus do to promote it. From this union spring forth factories making nuts and bolts and sewing-machines and engines and the thousand products and by-products of this age and place of steel. Therefore Cleveland is Cleveland.

[SOLDIERS' AND SAILORS' MONUMENT, CLEVELAND.]

It may not only be said that Cleveland is herself; it should also be added that Cleveland has done some things first which are worth doing anyway, and which are especially worth doing first. As among the colleges Williams and Harvard have done not a few first things, so among the cities Cleveland may claim a certain priority. The city was, if not the first, among the first to adopt the federal system of municipal government, a system which, after ten years of usefulness, has proved to be like every other form of democratic government, good if good men are in control, and bad if bad men are in control. Cleveland was the first to adopt the proper method for the government and administration of its public schools, namely the separation of the business side of the administration from the educational, a system, too, which, like the more general plan of government, finds its efficiency in the character of the men who administer it. In Cleveland, too, was organized the great Epworth League of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Here, too, one of the first women in America to enter the medical profession was trained in the old Medical College, now a part of the Western Reserve University. Here the recondite experiments were made by Morley for determining the atomic weight of oxygen, and practical experiments by Brush for giving the best light, as well as the important experiments also made by Brush which resulted in adding "etherion" to the elements. Here, also, important facilities in the use of the public library and in the making of finest machinery, such as is used in astronomical apparatus, were first applied. One, too, should not in a commercial age be suffered to forget that in Cleveland the Standard Oil Company was born and grew to be a lusty youth.

This city of first things had as its first man and founder, one whose name it bears, Moses Cleveland. A Connecticut man, born in Canterbury, Windham County, in 1754, graduated at Yale in 1777, admitted to the bar, interrupting his professional practice by service in the Revolutionary army, serving in the Connecticut Legislature and also in the State militia, Moses Cleveland was made agent for the Connecticut Land Company in 1796, and came into the historic territory of New Connecticut, or the Western Reserve.[2] He seems to have had those elements which usually are found in founders of states and builders of cities. Reserved in speech, vigorous in action, friendly with all, grave, shrewd, he was born to command. His career was brief: he died in the town of his birth in 1806; but he lived long enough to entertain a rational hope of the future greatness of the city he founded and named. It is said that he once remarked: "While I was in New Connecticut I laid out a town, on the bank of Lake Erie, which was called by my name, and I believe the child is now born that may live to see it grow as large as old Windham."

Moses Cleveland was a prophet at once true and false. Cleveland became as large as old Windham and even larger, in the lifetime of children born in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The method by which Cleveland has attained the first place in its State, and the seventh place in the United States, is a process, a growth, and not a manufacture. In the year 1830, thirty-four years after the coming of Moses Cleveland, it had only a thousand people; but the one thousand had increased to six thousand by 1840, and in the next ten years the six thousand increased threefold. In the next ten years the number more than doubled, becoming forty-three thousand in 1860, and yet again doubled in the following decade. By 1870, it had become ninety-two thousand. The doubling process could not long continue, but it came so near it that in 1880 there were one hundred and sixty thousand inhabitants, in 1890 two hundred and sixty thousand and more, and in 1900 almost four hundred thousand.