Revisiting the Earth Part 14

Bridgewater is a belle among residential communities. The best place in this country or in any other to raise girls. The street is attractive.

The house fine, yet it seems distinct, different. I think most men feel so about the house in which they were married. In all other shrines I had made a home. Isaac blessed Jacob and sent him away to Padan-Aram to take a wife from thence, and G.o.d appeared unto Jacob again when he came out of Padan-Aram and blessed him. Under similar conditions the Duke of Buckingham dropped his purse so that the person finding it might feel that nothing but good fortune attends the visit to a home like that. I used to like to go there, yet I had to do, every day, the full work of an adult at home, and so it became plain that I would get along better if I could locate both of my interests in the same place. In speaking of weddings much is said with truth about "the negligible groom." I could not long live on angel cake and so I had to turn abruptly to face the prosier plain bread and b.u.t.ter question; so when the bird was caught and caged I took up the inquiries, What shall we eat and wherewithal shall we be clothed? It is a merciful provision that this latter question rests lightly upon the groom for the first decade, as some part of the hat the bride wore to Washington (it being understood that a wedding admits no variation but means either a trip to Washington or Niagara Falls) will reappear as a feature of her headdress with much variation of location during the next ten years.

The place of the wedding is always a conspicuous shrine. On revisiting the earth we were strolling around the streets, quite a number of soldiers were about and were entertaining the girls at a soda fountain, and one of the enlisted men told a pitiful story about swallowing a pin, and when a vivacious young lady expressed alarm and sympathy, "Oh," he said, "no harm could come of it; it was a safety pin."

_Heart Histories_

We go there often and sit on the stone steps of the old Unitarian church just as we did when we were young and foolish. Times have changed incredibly since the visit to Padan Aram or else a favorite and very accomplished writer just at this writing is all dead wrong in throwing the weight of his great influence against what he calls being "married without capital." This would cut out the wedding of Dr. Joseph Parker of the City Temple, London, the greatest expositor of scripture known to us. "Improvident" is the word his biographer uses "certainly when tested by the maxims of the world. He was twenty-two without having secured a definite position." But marriages are to be judged by their history. Let us hear the eloquent orator himself. He speaks of "Annie, the soul I loved, the girl who saved me and made me a man." His estimate of her varied from the opinion the editor we have quoted would have put upon her. She was gentle, domesticated, cultivated, with a poetic turn of mind, and like Mary of Bethany, religiously meditative. She read widely, being now more a.s.siduous than ever in her Bible studies. Her appet.i.te in this was twofold for her husband and herself. She asked G.o.d to bless him and He blessed them both. He was strong, const.i.tuted for public life, full of fire, and prepared to take the kingdom of heaven by violence. We feel like questioning Cupid's sanity when he brings together persons of such diverse natures, training, antecedents, and tendencies, but among opposites, in disposition, Cupid displays his best achievements. They took life together as they found it. To have "saved" one of the world's greatest forces, to have "made him a man" was more than an equivalent for living on short commons for some few weeks while they were getting under way. Working out good fortune together is great happiness to many young people who know each other well and without reservation believe in each other and in their future. A young man graduating or entering a business life must make his capital before he can share it. There is much to be said in favor of what many healthy spirited girls achieve when their affections are satisfied. Adam was asleep when he chose his wife and this is one reason why things proved so out of joint. The strong dissuasive to become "married without capital" would have borne heavily upon Peter H. Burnett when a clerk in a country store on two hundred dollars a year, less than four dollars a week beside his board.

_Women Not Gone to the Dogs_

He had met a beautiful girl and one day having dined with her family and talked with the young lady herself after dinner he came out of the house and was amazed to discover that the sun was gone from the sky. In a confused manner I enquired of her father what had become of the sun. He politely replied, "It has gone down." A new heaven and a new earth surrounded him. They were married and lived happily ever after. It was not Mrs. Burnett "and her lesser fraction." An humble home was paradise to him with the right girl. Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox without it. Sometimes I think that the rich face greater problems in the matter of marriage than even the poor. Such a wedding based on affection goes far toward nullifying the phrase "lottery of marriage." An American girl can marry an English Duke if her father has money enough. In this country the prevalent sanct.i.ty of marriage can be attributed chiefly to the fact that among the rank and file, husbands and wives have generally married each other for love.

Perhaps this statement would not apply to the smart set in some commercial cities. This young man did his best. He became the president of the Pacific Bank of San Francisco and the first Governor of California. And as for a young woman she will become quite a heroine, in hard outward conditions, if her affections are entirely satisfied.

Having spirit and courage and health she often becomes quite a prop to the prosperity of the household. She does not need to be supported in idleness by her husband. As between the two, it is often the case that she can earn about as much as he can. A young lady has just become a bride who had been receiving a larger salary than her own father ever earned. In new countries, under pioneer conditions, that is true today, which was distinctly a fact in early New England, that a marriage was a partnership, which made for thrift. Of course affection works out her sums by different rules.

_Shall the Union Survive_

Chinese wives are valued by their weight. French marriages have been generally happier than the English owing to the comparative ascendency which the French wives possess over their husbands, or better, the equality we find that exists between them.

There is a proverbial prejudice in an English establishment against the interference of a woman in the husband's conduct of his private affairs.

This is that one matter in which any theorist can prove his position, for in solving the problem it is natural to him to count the hits and not the misses. He arrays unquestioned facts and depends on those who follow his recital to jump at the conclusion he desires. It was suggestive to notice that Governor Burnett, when presenting such a fine specimen of feminine attractiveness, that while showing us that he was overwhelmed by it, did not directly describe the girl, but made us infer what the facts were by the situation and by the results she brought about. To make you appreciate the Lady of the Lake, Scott alludes to her in att.i.tude and grace and lets the reader's mind supply the picture.

_Lights in Their Dwellings_

It is astonishing to notice what heroic young women have been doing in meeting rather hard conditions occasioned in part by the high cost of living. Give the girl all round confidence, imagine her susceptibilities and energies to be happily employed, and she will undertake a temporary encounter with poverty with bravery. The one she has chosen among men has to meet it whether he will or no. In addressing themselves to that problem, by united enterprise, some young people have pa.s.sed their most joyous years. We find here the magic spell which transforms a house into a home. Musicians rarely give their best exhibition when singing or performing in a hostile atmosphere. It is so with women. Happiness is never an accident. There is no such thing as an accident. Everything has a cause if we can find it.

CHAPTER XVIII

A NEW KNOCK AT AN OLD DOOR

Forty years were long enough to eliminate all the Israelites of one generation. It appears that in that length of time all the adults of one generation that had dwelt in Egypt were gone except two. Reckoning things then on a scriptural basis and a.s.suming that all who lived forty years ago are gone, except two, a grave responsibility obviously rests upon me, as I have seen more than a generation rise and wane, to let the people of the present age or period in a definite locality know how things look in that lifetime just preceding their own. I remember when we had preaching services Sunday afternoon in all our churches at three o'clock and by count in our church the attendance often differed only by two, forenoon, afternoon and evening. I remember when Christmas and Easter observances were introduced into Sabbath services, it having been customary from Puritan days in New England to make, on Sunday, next to no reference to them excepting in Catholic and Episcopal Churches.

_Lost Facts of Local History_

Unless one sticks a stake, at some definite point, say less than a generation ago, he is not likely to remember that powerful electric lights have not always been, like the images of the Israelites, on every high hill and under every green tree. It is hard for me to realize that at my table I burned the midnight oil in Lynn, particularly when the next morning was Sunday, and my library during my ministry of twelve years was never decorated with anything but a student lamp. The city was in the kerosene oil period. The front hall lamp used to drip petroleum upon the carpet on the stairs, and I was contributing my full share to give John D. Rockefeller a start in his oil-refining business, a start indeed that I hear he has not been slow to appreciate and improve. After reaching the big hall down town, as the lights supplied to Professor Churchill, the renowned elocutionist from Andover, seemed dim, I left the hall and went out and bought a student lamp and had a wick put in and filled it with kerosene, which if now brought into a blazing auditorium in these enlightened days would be like holding a candle to the sun. In a more significant way the city has turned from Darkness into light.

_Publicity is Light_

We stood in relation to the gambling evil about where the country now stands in relation to drunkeries, whose death warrant we have lived to see signed. The hand-writing was written on the wall touching lotteries but they were winked at when conducted only for sweet charity's sake even after the death-knell had sounded. In a church fair a fine young acquaintance got a pony for fifty cents as he held the lucky ticket.

Unless a person has felt it or witnessed it, he little conceives the fury of the pa.s.sion to which gambling appeals. When fired up, there are men who would cross Sheol on a rotten pole to make money in a game of chance. It starts an appet.i.te that feeding does not satisfy. It seems to rage by the fuel it feeds on. These lotteries, like the plague of frogs, were everywhere. For constructing the earliest building of Williams College, that is in particular the mother of missionaries, a lottery was granted and $3500 were raised.[2] It goes with the blood in Ma.s.sachusetts, for when the State was hard up she used to spring a lottery, in one of which Harvard College drew four tickets, and clergymen seemed to have been particularly successful, and teachers for purposes of publicity were likeliest of all to profit by the turn of the wheel, till at length the whole gambling fabric suddenly, like the walls of Jericho, fell down flat.

[Footnote 2: See Harper's Cyclopedia, p. 390, and The Book of Berkshire, p. 30.]

_Cupid All Smiling_

Here was purely and distinctively an American City. The people were h.o.m.ogeneous in language, modes of thought and type of character. She had the specific New England, or Yankee, cast of mind. For her factories, forces were drawn from the hillsides, particularly of New Hampshire.

There were elderly people, as we shall see, but the prevailing type was youthful, and the young lady contingent was attractive and had a good deal of the quality which we call charm. I wrote a column for a local paper, out of my experience on "Tying the Silken Knot," and Dr. Henry Hinckley, referring to my contribution and using my t.i.tle, went beyond even my testimony, affirming that the City of Shoes furnished more marriageable material to the square rod than any other city of its size, and he seemed to attribute the fact, not merely to the incident that they met here under pleasant auspices, but that they heard in churches that marriage is honorable and that it is not good for man to be alone.

A couple would come to the parsonage, and if the a.s.sociate pastor went to the door the young man would say, "Where's your foreman?" meaning her husband. As the lady of the Manse was entirely supported by her wedding fees and had money to lend, and as I married more people than could be seated in my church, if they should come together at one time, I have often deeply regretted that in the hurry and toil of removal, it did not occur to me to invite them all to attend a special service to be arranged for them, with specific hymns, and a practical address. I think I can claim for the couples that I made happy, the banner low record in the small percentage of divorces.

_The Royal Families_

The house of one parishioner was built in the century before the last, while General Washington was alive and on the earth, and was rich in history and tradition. A call upon the family was a lesson out of Colonial Records, the paper on the wall like that at Mt. Vernon, being of the same period.

"And, from its station in the hall, an ancient timepiece says to all, 'Forever--never!

Never--forever!'"

"Through days of sorrow and of mirth, Through days of death and days of birth, Through every swift vicissitude Of changeful time, unchanged it has stood, And as if, like G.o.d, it all things saw, It calmly repeats those words of awe 'Forever--never!

Never--forever!'"

It knew more than I did, and could point out the moon's changes, and the seasons, and the seconds.

What makes the place? Not any one man, nor any group of men, but the inner spirit of the city, what I will call the genius of community life, which gives that indefinable tone that marks the city from the town, and that when amplified belongs only to an industrial a.s.semblage of people.

I attributed her phenomenal individualism, first to her unpedestaled idol, Rev. Parsons Cook, D.D., who made so much of individual work and accountability, also to her antecedents and atmosphere in which men working alone developed the contemplative habits of shoemakers. As they kept thinking they kept having new ideas and they had them hard.

Families dwelt apart. Nothing is so revolutionary as the development of apartment hotels, and particularly of a prodigious number of restaurants. Her social, charitable and benefit a.s.sociations must have arisen in the years under review, from almost a negligible quant.i.ty to well-nigh half a thousand.

_A Social Revolution_

In the self-evolving life of the place there has been a strong trend toward a.s.sociated life, which has reconditioned everything. It is without a parallel in the entire history of the community. Cities are themselves prominent waymarks in human history. Cincinnatus, when at his plow, was summoned by voices from the city. The tendency toward congregate life is witnessed by the enormous increase in the number of play-houses and in the attendance upon them. In an earlier day one stood for a time in solitary prominence and has become grandfather to a big brood. There has been an astounding increase in what I will call the department of service. If a person is on the street in the late afternoon when the matinees are over, and the women's clubs, and as well the errands and social visits, he will see another form of new, a.s.sociated life, in the descent by hundreds, upon all the new delicatessen shops, and similar departments in stores where cooked and nicely prepared foods are kept for evening tables. If anything has seemed hungrier than these individuals, it has been the furnace during severe weather.

_The Glory of the Commonplace_

Because of increasing wealth and education and refinement, people put out their work more into laundries and bakeries and general mutual business concerns. This, like mercy, blesses him that gives and him that takes. If anything is to be inferred from the growth in co-operative housekeeping in the last generation it will come to some real good, complete result, surely, in the next decade. Speed the day. It is of course the solution in part of the servant girl question. What was once a luxury is now a.s.sumed to be a necessity. As things are going, men will soon refuse a mansion in the skies, unless luxuries are promised that our ancestors never heard of. We would expect great development in a rural community that is in the knee-pant period. As Cicero said, "Nothing is discovered and perfected at the same time." We do well, for every reason, to make much of what is so delightfully historic.

Even patriotism is grounded and rooted in the past. I like a certain relish there is in the place. The soul of it, too, suits my fancy.

Things, there, were in some way pitched in the right key. It took New York a hundred and seventy-five years to gain its first thirty-three thousand inhabitants. While our industrial city has developed very much more rapidly, the unlikeness ceases, when it comes to the matter of crooked streets, which prevail also in Boston, but some one has said that he does not include Boston when he speaks of the United States. In the inspired volume we read of a street that was called Straight, but that term would not be applied to Pearl St. in New York, which hits Broadway twice. Mr. Ruskin tells us that there is not one straight line in nature.

_The Missing Link_

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," "G.o.d-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 ent.i.tled to exception.