In the matter of public improvements an equitable adjustment of relations—always heretofore uncertain and unsatisfactory—between the District and the general government still remains to be accomplished, and at this writing is impatiently awaited by the city. Congress should explicitly define for itself a course that can be depended upon, so that the city can go ahead and know what it ought to do. The general government, promising great things which began nowhere and ended in nothing, laid out the city for its own use, and gave more space to streets and ornamental grounds than to buildings. The plan was wise and good, but did not appear so until the liberal citizens, unable to endure the disgrace of such a city as the nation thrust upon them, taxing themselves six millions of dollars for street purposes, went generously to work, with their own money improved the immense fronts of the government property, which pays no taxes, evolved something tangible out of the old cloudy-magnificent plan, and gave the country, so far as they could, a decent capital.
There is another important matter for adjustment. The city has left nothing undone that money and labor could do to make the public schools the best in the United States. It is doubtful whether there has ever before been seen in any city or State an expenditure for public schools so generous, under all the circumstances, as that of Washington within the past few years. The best school-houses here are the best the Prussian commissioners, who lately came to inspect them, had ever seen. A very great number of the pupils educated by the city are the children of government servants whose homes are in the States, and who pay no considerable taxes here. Every State and Territory has received a liberal allotment of public land for school-purposes except the District of Columbia, which has probably done more for schools without the endowment, considering the time and taxable property at command, than any State has ever done with it.
Of course the city has received many benefits from the general government, but the considerable ones have been indirect. The excellent water-works, for instance, costing about three millions of dollars, were built with the nation's money and by army engineers, because the nation needed them, and show how entirely identical are the interests of both parties. Their respective duties, while they need defining anew, are so wedded that there is no room for serious difference. It is really a matter for congratulation that the general government held back and did not take more of the improvements into its own hands. The city's present claims are by so much stronger: the two governments can work in harmony, and any efforts that are now made will not be thrown away. Had Congress acted sooner we might have had more Washington canals, and Washington and Georgetown street-cars, and similar Congressional "improvements," beginning nowhere but in ignorance or selfishness, and ending in nothing but nuisances. The improvement of the interiors of the national grounds, however, by the general government, is now keeping pace with that of the exteriors by the city as nearly as is possible under present legislation, and their superintendence has become at last an office of some practical consequence to Washington. The general government owns about one-half of the property in the District, and during seventy years has expended for the improvement of the thoroughfares a little over one million of dollars. The city during the same time has expended for the same purpose nearly fourteen millions of dollars.
The old Washington idea seems to have consisted in finishing a city before it was begun. To use an architectural figure, the capital of the column has been well designed and partly carved, but the base is not yet laid. Those characteristics which the builders thought would be a sure foundation of greatness have proved insufficient in the past and will prove so in the future. The infusion of new blood has done wonders within ten years, but there is still needed the admixture of another current. Wealth and ideality—supposed to be possessed by all who are attracted hither—do not raise a man above material wants or fail to multiply them. When Washington shall give her utmost attention to satisfying the vulgarest common wants of common people, she will have taken her first real step toward—anything. She has had enough of fog and moonshine. She wants for a proper period the most unmitigated materiality—not as an end, of course, but as the first means of making something else possible. She will be made our republican Paris, if made so at all, by the aid of the shops, the wonderful skilled labor, the economical living of poor people, on which rested, as well as on higher things, the splendors of the imperial Paris. The average American lady goes to that city to buy "things," as well as to visit the Louvre, and while the late emperor endeavored to make his capital the social centre of the world, he did not scorn to make it a fashionable market and foster a Palace of Industry.
That Washington is an admirable place for manufactures is clear to all who have sought the facts. Whether she will ever become a manufacturing city is a question that must be settled by the citizens themselves. Whoever doubts that the growth of skilled labor here will be an indispensable condition of the higher growth that is sought fails to understand modern civilization, and should not have survived the days when things began nowhere and ended in nothing. The old thoroughbred Washingtonian will never invest a dollar to build a railroad or a modern workshop, of course. He does not know anything about them, and does not want to. His idea of business is to get real estate, and "hold on" till somebody else makes it valuable. Gentlemen of new Washington, Hercules will stand idle till he sees your own shoulders at the wheel. When you shall have the faithful, enlightened manual labor of New England, you may expect such flowers as Yale and Harvard and the æsthetic fruits they enfold. You may be unable to see any intimate connection between such labor and such culture, but nevertheless it exists. Old Washington could not see it, and now you are compelled to bury old Washington out of sight. It is time for Mohammed to start if he wants his mountain.
There are a few business-men in Washington who are as enlightened, as liberal, as trustworthy as any in the country; and abundant is their reward. There are a few who deal only in good wares, who always sell them at a reasonable profit, who believe that any kind of deception is a blunder, who manage their establishments with economy, who are aware that the more money they permit their customers to make the more they will ultimately make themselves,—who, in short, have learned the principles of business and have the character to stand by them. But so many fall short—often through ignorance—in one or more of these respects that the average business character is low. If a lady wishes to spend twenty-five dollars in shopping, she can generally travel eighty miles—to Baltimore and back—and save enough of that small sum to pay her for going, besides being sure of finding what she wants. The Washington shopkeepers may really think that they cannot help this. They must help it, or consent to be soon shoved aside by those who can. Instead of being troubled by the sight of his best customers going as far as New York whenever they have anything of consequence to buy, the genuine old Washington retailer seems to take a calm satisfaction in putting such fastidious buyers to so much inconvenience. Here it is rather the exception than the rule for the man of small business to do just what he promises to do. He don't know the value of another's time, is used to disappointments himself, and somehow or other will manage to disarrange your most careful calculations. Unable himself to meet an engagement thoroughly and exactly, he seems determined that nobody else shall.
But you cease censuring the average business-man when you begin to deal with the average Washington mechanic. There are some good ones, but they are absorbed by the large and experienced dealers in labor, and are beyond the knowledge or reach of ordinary mortals. You want a little job done at your house; you call on a "boss;" certainly—it shall be done instantly; a workman will be sent in a few minutes; two days afterward he comes and "looks at it;" the next day he returns with another man and they both look at it; another day passes, and an apprentice-boy, with a lame negro to wait on him, comes and makes your home hideous by pretending to begin; when they have given your family a proper amount of information, and torn things to pieces sufficiently, they go away. Two more days elapse, and you go again to the boss; he is surprised—he supposed the work had been done, for he had given "orders;" at the end of a week perhaps the job that should have consumed two hours of honest work is done; then, if you pay the boss no more than the work actually cost him, you know that the sum is twice as much as it should have cost him. As a generalization this is a true picture of Washington labor.
These things are trifles? They are just what determine the permanent residence of multitudes of valuable citizens. They are the trifles that in the aggregate make the difference between civilization and barbarism. For every broken promise or slighted piece of work the city suffers. Civilized people like to live smoothly and comfortably. Washington, thinking of something besides hotels and boarding-houses, and the people of leisure who come once a year to fill them for a few weeks, must provide for a permanent population of moderately poor people. The word of a merchant or banker is supposed to be as good as his bond; his occupation is gone when this ceases to be the case; his standing is reported in a business guide-book, and dealers with him act accordingly. Cannot some of the methods that enforce integrity in higher branches of business be more systematically applied by dealers in manual labor? The men who are reforming the city's outward appearance have an opportunity of doing something in this direction. A Northern mechanic who reverences his conscience, and makes the most of his opportunities to gain knowledge and character, cannot emigrate to a better place than Washington.
Yet when one looks into the past he thinks that perhaps labor is improving as fast as other things here. He is inclined to admire it when he remembers how much worse it used to be. John Adams was the first occupant of the White House, and this is what his wife said in a private letter just after moving into it: "To assist us in this great castle, and render less attendance necessary, bells are wholly wanting, not one single one being hung through the whole house, and promises are all you can obtain. If they put me up bells, and let me have wood enough to keep fires, I design to be pleased. But, surrounded with forests, can you believe that wood is not to be had, because people cannot be found to cut and cart it?" Seventy-two years ago the President's wife could get nothing but promises toward hanging a servant's bell! Washington was in a forest and couldn't furnish wood enough to warm the presidential hearthstone! The forests and people of that day are gone, but those eternal "promises" remain.
The recent building in Washington has been mostly that of dwellings, which the ordinary visitor, following the old routes between the Capitol and West End, will hardly notice, although they have covered many acres within the past four years. Since the Board of Public Works has settled—some would say unsettled—the foundations of things, we may expect to see the heavy building for business purposes, which must soon take place even if there be no change in the character of business, conducted with a little system and uniformity. The streets themselves have been made so fine that it will require some moral courage—a thing for which Washington is not noted—to disfigure them by the hideous jumbles that accorded so well with the old ways. Such splendid monstrosities as the Treasury—as a whole, the worst public building in the city, although good in parts, so situated that one must go down stairs from Pennsylvania Avenue to get into the grand north entrance, without proportion, completeness or consistency—it will be impossible even for Congress to build.