Chapter V (1)

For eighty years Henri Fabre watched the insects. He stayed with his friend the spider the round of the clock. Time, that reveals the spider, is also eloquent of man in his city. Time is the scene-shifter and the detective. Some day we should pitch a metropolitan observatory at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street,--some day, if we can find the time.

AS AN ALIEN FEELS

Twenty-five years ago I knew but dimly that the United States existed. My first dream of it came, as well as I remember, from the strange gay flag that blew above a circus tent on the Fair Green. It was a Wild West Show, and for years I associated America with the intoxication of the circus and, for no reason, with the tang of oranges. "Two a penny, two a penny, large penny oranges! Buy away an' ate away, large penny oranges!" They were oranges from Seville then, but the odor of them and the fumes of circus excitement gave me a first gay ribald sense of the United States.

The next allied sense was gathered from a scallawag uncle. He had sought his fortune in America--sought it, as I infer now, on the rear end of a horse-car. When he came home he was full of odd and delicious oaths. "Gosh hell hang it" was his chief touch of American culture. He was a "Yank" in local parlance, a frequently drunken Yank. His fine drooping mustache too often drooped with porter. Once, a boy of nine, I steadied him home under the October stars and absorbed a long alcoholic reverie on the Horseshoe Falls. As we slept together that night in the rat-pattering loft, and as he absently appropriated all the horse-blanket, I had plenty of chance to shiver over the wonderments of the Horseshoe Falls.

This, with an instilled idea that America and America alone could offer "work," foreshadowed the American landscape. It is the bald hope of work that finally magnetizes us hither. But every dream and every loyalty was with the unhappy land from which I came.

For many months the music of New York harbor spoke only of home. Every outgoing steamer that opened its throat made me homesick. America was New York, and New York was down town, and down town was a vortex of new duties. There I learned the bewildering foreign tongue of earning a living, and the art of eating at Childs'. At night the hall-bedroom near Broadway, and the resourceless promenade up and down Broadway for amusement. The only women to say "dear," the women who say it on the street.

In Chicago, not in New York, I found the United States. The word "settlement" gave me my first puzzled intimation that there was somewhere a clew to this grim struggle down town. I had looked for it in boarding-houses. I had looked for it in stenographic night-schools. I had sought it in the blotchy Sunday newspaper, in Coney Island, in long jaunts up the Palisades. I had looked for it among the street-walkers, the first to proffer intimacy. And of course, not being clever enough, I had overlooked it. But in Chicago, as I say, I came on it at home.

America dawned for me in a social settlement. It dawned for me as a civilization and a faith. In all my first experiences of my employers I got not one glimpse of American civilization. Theirs was the language of smartness, alertness, brightness, success, efficiency, and I tried to learn it, but it was a difficult and alien tongue. Some of them were lawyers, but they were interested in penmanship and ability to clean ink-bottles. Some of them were business men, but they were interested in ability to typewrite and to keep the petty cash. It was not their fault. Ours was not an affair of the heart. But if it had not been for the social settlement, I should still be an alien to the bone.

Till I knew a social settlement the American flag was still a flag on a circus-tent, a gay flag but cheap. The cheapness of the United States was the message of quick-lunch and the boarding-house, of vaudeville and Coney Island and the Sunday newspaper, of the promenade on Broadway. In the social settlement I came on something entirely different. Here on the ash-heap of Chicago was a blossom of something besides success. The house was saturated in the perfume of the stockyards, to make it sweet. A trolley-line ran by its bedroom windows, to make it musical. It was thronged with Jews and Greeks and Italians and soulful visitors, to make it restful. It was inhabited by high-strung residents, to make it easy. But it was the first place in all America where there came to me a sense of the intention of democracy, the first place where I found a flame by which the melting-pot melts. I heard queer words about it. The men, I learned, were mollycoddles, and the women were sexually unemployed. The ruling class spoke of "unsettlement workers" with animosity, the socialists of a mealy-mouthed compromise. Yet in that strange haven of clear humanitarian faith I discovered what I suppose I had been seeking--the knowledge that America had a soul.

How one discovers these things it is hard to put honestly. It is like trying to recall the first fair wind of spring. But I know that slowly and unconsciously the atmosphere of the settlement thawed out the asperity of alienism. There were Americans of many kinds in residence, from Illinois, from Michigan, from New York, English-Americans, Russian-Americans, Austrian-Americans, German-Americans, men who had gone to Princeton and Harvard, women spiritually lavendered in Bryn Mawr. The place bristled with hyphens. But the Americanism was of a kind that opened to the least pressure from without, and never shall I forget the way these residents with their "North Side" friends had managed so graciously to domesticate the annual festival of my own nationality. That, strange though it may seem, is the more real sort of Americanization Day.

From Walt Whitman, eventually, the naturalizing alien breathes in American air, but I doubt if I should have ever known the meaning of Walt Whitman had I not lived in that initiating home. It was easy in later years to see new meanings in the American flag, to stand with Ethiopia Saluting the Colors, but it was in the settlement I found the sources from which it was dyed. For there, to my amazement, one was not expected to believe that man's proper place is on a Procrustean bed of profiteering. A different tradition of America lived there, one in which the earlier faiths had come through, in which the way to heaven was not necessarily up a skyscraper. In New England, later, I found many ideas of which the settlement was symptomatic, but as I imbibed them they were "America" for me.

What it means to come at last into possession of Lincoln, whose spirit is so precious to the social settlement, is probably unintelligible to Lincoln's normal inheritors. To understand this, however, is to understand the birth of a loyalty. In the countries from which we come there have been men of such humane ideals, but they have almost without exception been men beyond the pale. The heroes of the peoples of Europe have not been the governors of Europe. They have been the spokesmen of the governed. But here among America's governors and statesmen was a simple authenticator of humane ideals. To inherit him becomes for the European not an abandonment of old loyalties, but a summary of them in a new. In the microcosm of the settlement perhaps Lincolnism is too simple. Many of one's promptest acquiescences are revised as one meets and eats with the ruling class later on. But the salt of this American soil is Lincoln. When one finds that, one is naturalized.

It is curious how the progress of naturalization becomes revealed to one. I still recollect with a thrill the first time I attended a national political convention and listened to the roll-call of the States. "Alabama! Arizona! Arkansas!" Empty names for many years, at last they were filled with one clear concept, the concept of the democratic experiment. "As I have walk'd in Alabama my morning walk"--the living appeal to each state by name recalled Whitman's generous amusing scope. "Far breath'd land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez'd! The diverse! The compact! The Pennsylvanian! The Virginian! The double Carolinian!" The orotund roll-call was not intended to evoke Whitman. It was intended, as it happened, to evoke votes for Taft and Sherman. But even these men were parts of the democratic experiment. And the vastly peopled hall answered for Walt Whitman, as the empurpled Penrose did not answer. It was they who were the leaves of our grass.

In Whitman, as William James has shown, there is an arrant mysticism which his own Democratic Vistas exposed in cold light. Yet into this credulity as to the virtue and possibilities of the people an alien is likely to enter if his first intimacy with America came in the aliens' creche. A settlement is a creche for the step-children of Europe, and it is hard not to credit America at large with some of the impulses which make the settlement. Such, at any rate, is the tendency I experienced myself.

With this tendency, what of loyalty to the United States? I think of Lincoln and his effected mysticism by Union, union for the experiment, and I feel alive within me a complete identification with this land. The keenest realization of the nation reached me, as I recall, the first time I saw the capitol in Washington. Quite unsuspecting I strolled up the hill from the station, just about midnight, the streets gleaming after a warm shower. The plaza in front of the capitol was deserted. A few high sentinel lamps threw a lonely light down the wet steps and scantily illumined the pillars. Darkness veiled the dome. Standing apart completely by myself, I felt as never before the union of which this strength and simplicity was the symbol. The quietude of the night, the scent of April pervading it, gave to the lonely building a dignity such as I had seldom felt before. It seemed to me to stand for a fine and achieved determination, for a purpose maintained, for a quiet faith in the peoples and states that lay away behind it to far horizons. Lincoln, I thought, had perhaps looked from those steps on such a night in April, and felt the same promise of spring.

SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

One should not be ashamed to acknowledge the pursuit of the secret of life. That secret, however, is shockingly elusive. It is quite visible to me, somewhere in space. Like a ball swung before a kitten, it taunts my eye. Like a kitten I cannot help making a lunge after it. But tied to the ball there seems to be a mischievous invisible string. My eye fixes the secret of life but it escapes my paw.

During the Russo-Japanese War I thought I had it. It involved a great deal of stern discipline. Physically it meant giving up meat, Boston garters and cigarettes. It seemed largely composed of rice, hot baths followed by rolling in the snow and jiu jitsu. The art of jiu jitsu hinted at the very secret itself. Here was the crude West seeking to slug its way to mastery while the commonest Japanese had only to lay hold of life by the little finger to reduce it to squealing submission. The sinister power of jiu jitsu haunted me. Unless the West could learn it we were putty in Japanese hands. It was the acme of effortless subtlety. A people with such an art, combined with ennobling vegetarianism, must necessarily be a superior people. I privately believed that the Japanese had employed it in sinking the Russian fleet.

Thomas Alva Edison displaced jiu jitsu in my soul and supplanted it with a colossal contempt for sleep. An insincere contempt for food I already protested. No nation could hope to take the field that subsisted on heavy foods--such unclean things as sausages and beer. The secret of world mastery was a diet of rice. "We all eat too much" became a fixed conviction. But Mr. Edison forced a greater conviction--we all sleep too much as well. This thought had first come to me from Arnold Bennett. Sleep was a matter of habit, of bad habit. We sleep ourselves stupid. Who could not afford to lose a minute's sleep? Reduce sleep by a minute a day--who would miss it? And in 500 days you would have got down to the classical forty winks. Mr. Edison did not merely preach this gospel. He modestly indicated his own career to illustrate its successful practicability. To cut down sleep and cut down food was the only way to function like a superman.

Once started on this question of habits I spent a life of increasing turmoil. From Plato I heard the word moderation, but from William Blake I learned that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." From Benjamin Franklin I gathered the importance of good habits, but William James gleefully told me to avoid all habits, even good ones. And then came Scientific Management.

The concept of scientific management practically wrecked my life. I discovered that there was a right way of doing everything and that I was doing everything wrongly. It was no new idea to me that we were all astray about the simplest things. We did not know how to breathe properly. We did not know how to sit properly. We did not know how to walk properly. We wore a hard hat: it was making us bald. We wore pointed shoes: it was unfair to our little toe. But scientific management did not dawdle over such details. It nonchalantly pointed out that "waste motions" were the chief characteristic of our lives.

One of the most fantastic persons in the world is the public official who, before he can write a postal order or a tax receipt, has to make preliminary curls of penmanship in the air. Observed by the scientific eye, we are much more fantastic ourselves. If our effective motions could be registered on a visual target, our record would be found to resemble that of savages who use ammunition without a sight on their guns. If we think that the ordinary soldier's marksmanship is wasteful, we may well look to ourselves. Our life is peppered with motions that fly wide and wild. It begins on awaking. We stretch our arms--waste motion! We ought to utilize that gesture for polishing our shoes. We rub our eyes--more foolishness. We should rub our eyes on Sunday for the rest of the week. But it is in processes like shaving that scientific management is really needed. Men flatter themselves that they shave with the minimum of gesture. They believe that they complete the operation under five minutes. But, excusing their inaccuracy, do they know that under the inspection of the scientific manager their performance would look as jagged as their razorblade under the microscope? The day will probably arrive when a superman will shave with one superb motion, as delightful to the soul as the uncoiling of an orange-skin in one long unbroken peel.

In reading the newspaper a man most betrays the haphazard, unscrutinized conduct of his morn. We pick up our paper without any suspicion that we are about to commit intellectual felony. We do not know that the news editor is in a conspiracy to play on our minds. If men gyrate too much physically, they certainly are just as anarchistic when they start to look over the news. It is not so much that they begin the day with devouring the details of a murder or lull themselves with some excuse for not reading a British note on the blockade. It is the fact that they are led by a ring running through their instincts to obey the particular editors they read.

Viewing myself as a human machine, I cannot understand how the human race has survived. Even conceding that I was normal, it is so much the worse for normality. I simply belong to a monstrous breed. There is not one important layman's practice that we have organized with regard to discipline and efficiency. If bricklayers waste motions in laying bricks, how about the motions wasted in lifting one's hat and the circumvolutions in putting links in one's cuffs? How about the impulsive child who wastes motions so recklessly in giving his mother a hug? The discovery seemed chilly that everything could be scientifically managed, everything could be perfected if one took up an altitudinous position at the center of one's life. But a fear of being chilly is a mark of inferiority. It ill becomes a human machine.

Yearning to live scrupulously on twenty-four hours a day, with vague longings to eat very little and sleep very little and master jiu jitsu and breathe deep and chew hard and practice Mueller exercises and give up tobacco and coffee and hug my mother scientifically and save waste motions in putting on my shirt, I happened to come across two European thinkers, a physician and a metaphysician. Paralleling Shakespeare's knowledge of dead languages by my own knowledge of live ones, I could not read these masters in the original to determine whether they blended like oil and vinegar or fought like water and oil. But in the eagerness of philosophic poverty I grasped just two delightful words from them, "instinct" and "repression." The metaphysician's secret of life, apparently, was to drop using one's so-called intelligence so frantically, to become more like those marvels of instinct, the hyena and the whale. The physician merely seemed to put the Ten Commandments in their place. To tell the truth, his detection of "repression" gave me no tangible promise. I exculpate the doctor. But the evolutionist turned my thoughts away from the early worries of discipline. This is the latest ball in the air that the kitten is chasing, with no suspicion of any tantalizing invisible string.

THE NEXT NEW YORK

You'd get awfully tired if I told you everything about my visit to New York in A. D. 1991. Some things are too complicated even to refer to, many things I've already forgotten, and a number of things I didn't understand. But as I had to return to my work as prison doctor in 1919 after a week of 1991 I grasped a few top impressions that may interest you. I hope I can give them to you straight.

The people on the street took my eye the minute I arrived in town. They looked so pleasing and they wore such stunning clothes. You know that at present, with the long indoor working day and the mixture of embalmed and storage and badly cooked food, the number of pasty-faced and emaciated men and women is very high. I exempt the hearty sweating classes like the structural iron workers and teamsters and porters and even policemen. You could recruit a fine-looking club from the building trades. But stand any afternoon on Fifth Avenue and size up the condition of the passers-by. You see shopgirls in thin cotton who are under-weight, under-slept, miserably nourished and devitalized. You see pimply waiters and stooping clerks. You see weary, fish-eyed mothers who look as if every day was washing day. Scores of sagging middle-aged people go by, who ought to be taken to a clinic. A little earlier in the afternoon it's almost impossible to share the sidewalk with the squat factory hands who overflow at the lunch hour. They're hard to kill, these poor fellows, but they're a puny, stinking, stunted, ill-favored horde. But the greater cleanliness of the people later on, and their better clothes, doesn't put them in a very different class. You hear a good deal about the queens you see, but, really, the city streets of New York in 1919, streaming with people who have dun clothes to match dun faces, make you wonder what's the use.

These people in 1991 were good to look at! The three-hour working day had a lot to do with it, of course, and the basic economic changes. But what leads me first to speak of appearances is the huge responsibility that had gone to hygienists. I mean educational and administrative. In 1991, I found, people were really acting on the theory that you can't have civilization without sound bodies. The idea itself was as old as an old joke, a platitude in the mouth of every pill-vender. But the city was working on it as if it were a pivotal truth, and this meant a total revision of ordinary conduct.

Building the Panama Canal was a simple little job compared to making New York hygienic. Thirty years must have been spent in getting the folks to realize that no man and woman had any hygienic excuse for breeding children within the city limits. It was sixty years, I was told, before it was official that a city child was an illegitimate child. At first mothers kicked hard when the illegitimates were confiscated, but in the end they came to see justice in the human version of the slogan, "an acre and a cow." It got rid of the good old city-bred medical formula that the best way to handle pregnancy is to handle it as a pathological condition. Of course this prohibition movement made all sorts of people mad. A bunch of Gold Coast women held out for a long time on the score of personal liberty. Women had private city babies where the inspectors couldn't get at them. You know, just like private whisky. But in the end the prohibitionists won, and it had an enormous effect on cleaning up Manhattan. It cut out all but the detached and the transient residents, and with the breathing space rules, these were far less than you'd suppose. Even with the great area of garden-roofs, the fixed residents were not much more than 100,000.

This demobilization wasn't special to New York. In other places there were much more rigid "units." Hygiene, nothing else, decided the unit size of cities in 1991. The old sprawling haphazard heterogeneous city gave place to the "modern" unit, permanent residences within the city never being open to families that had children under fourteen. For the heads of such families, however, the transportation problem was beautifully solved. Every unit city came to be so constructed that within half an hour of the "fresh air and exercise" homes, men and women could reach factories and warehouses in one direction, and offices and courts and banks and exchanges in another. This was after they realized the high cost of noise and dirt. The noiseless, dirtless, swift, freight train took the place of most trucks, and of course the remaining trucks shot up and down the non-pedestrian sanitary alleys. Another thing that interested me was the plexus of all the things that are to be exhibited. This involved a great problem for New York before factories were deported and the moving "H. G. Wells" sidewalks introduced. How to economize time and space, and yet not produce too close a homogeneity, too protein an intellectual and aesthetic and social diet, became a fascinating question. But the devotion of Blackwell's Island to summer and winter art and music, with all the other islands utilized for permanent exhibitions gave the city directors a certain leeway. The islands were made charming. I was quite struck over there, I think, on a new island in Flushing Bay, by the guild-managed shows of clothing, where you sat and watched the exhibits traveling on an endless belt, that stopped when you wanted it to--the kind that art exhibitions adopted for certain purposes. You see, the old department stores had passed away as utterly as the delivery horse and display advertising and the non-preventive physician. And the old game of "seasons" and fashions was abandoned soon after the celebrated trial of Conde Nast for the undermining of the taste of shopgirls. The job of the purchasing consumer was steadily simplified. Youth of both sexes learned fairly early in life what they could and what they couldn't do personally in the use of color. No one thought of copying another's color or design in dress any more than of copying another's oculist prescription. And with the guild consultants always ready to help out the troubled buyer, the business of shopping for clothes became as exciting and intelligent as the pastime of visiting a private exhibition. In this way, backed up by the guilds, a daring employment of color became generally favored. But a big item in this programme was the refusal of the guilds to prescribe any costumes for people who needed medical care first. It was useless, the guilds said, to decorate a mud-pie. And the hygienists agreed.

So you got back always to the doctrine of a sound body. In the hygienic riots of 1936 some horrible lynchings took place. An expert from the Chicago stockyards was then running the New York subways. He devised the upper-berth system by which the space between people's heads and the roof of the car could be used on express trains for hanging up passengers, like slabs of bacon. It was only after a few thousand citizens had failed to respond to the pulmotor which was kept at every station to revive weaklings, that the divine right of human beings to decent transportation became a real public issue. The hygienists made the great popular mistake of trying to save the stockyards man. They knew he had a sick soul. They believed that by psycho-analyzing him and showing he had always wanted to skin cats alive, they could put the traction question on a higher plane. Unfortunately the Hearst of that era took up the issue on the so-called popular side. He denounced the hygienists as heartless experts and showed how science was really a conspiracy in favor of the ruling class. The hygienic riots resulted in a miserable set-back to the compulsory psycho-analysis of all criminals, but the bloody assassination of the leading hygienist of the day brought about a reaction, and within thirty years no judge was allowed to serve who wasn't an expert in psychic work and hygiene. This decision was greatly aided by the publication of a brochure revealing the relation of criminal verdicts to the established neuroses of city magistrates. The promise that this work would be extended and published as a supplement to the Federal Reporter went a long way toward converting the Bar. The old pretensions of the Bar went rapidly to pieces when political use was made of important psychological and physiological facts. The hygienists spoke of "the mighty stream of morbid compulsion broadening down to more morbid compulsion." By 1950 no man with an OEdipus complex could even get on the Real Estate ticket, and the utter collapse of militarism came about with the magnificently scientific biographies of all the prominent armament advocates in the evil era.

I had a surprise coming for me in the total disappearance of prisons. Though I hate to confess it, I was a little amazed when I found that the old penology was just as historical in 1991 as the methodology of the Spanish Inquisition. Scientific men did possess models of prisons like Sing Sing and Trenton and Atlanta and Leavenworth, and the tiny advances in the latter prisons were thought amusing. But the deformity of the human minds and the social systems that permitted such prisons as ours was a matter for acute discussion and analysis everywhere, even in casual unspecialized groups. This general intelligence made it clear to me that social hygiene was never understood up to the middle of the twentieth century. The very name, after all, was appropriated by men afraid to specify the sex diseases they were then cleaning up. Puritanism, serviceable as it was in its time, had kept men from obtaining and examining the evidence necessary to right conclusions about conduct. "Think," said one delightful youth to me, on my first day in 1991, "think of not knowing the first facts as to the physiological laws of continence. Think of starting out after general physical well-being by the preposterous road of universal military service. Think of electing Congressmen in the old days without applying even the Binet test to them. Why, to-day we know nothing about 'the pursuit of happiness,' fair as that object is, and yet we should no more stand for such indiscriminateness than we'd allow a day to go by without swimming."

The youth, I should specify, was a female youth, what we call a girl. I had nothing to say to her. But my mind shot back to 1919, to which I was so soon to return, and I thought of a millionaire's device I had once seen in Chicago. Deep in the basement of a great factory building there was a small electric-lighted cell, and in this bare cell there was a gymnastic framework, perhaps four feet high, on which was strapped an ordinary leather saddle. In front of the saddle there rose two thin steel sticks, and out of them came thin leather reins. By means of a clever arrangement of springs down below that responded to an electric current, the whole mechanism was able to move up and down and backward and forward in short stabby jerks that were supposed to stir up your gizzard in practically the same way as the motion of a horse. This was, in fact, a synthetic horse, bearing the same aesthetic relation to a real horse that a phonograph song does to a real song that is poured out, so to speak, in the sun. And here, in the bald basement cell with its two barred basement windows (closed), the constipated millionaires take their turns, whenever they can bear it, going through the canned motions of a ride, staring with bored eyes at the blind tiled wall in front of them. So far, in 1919, had the worship of Hygeia carried the helot-captains of industry. And from that basement, from that heathen symbol of perverted exercise, men had returned to a primary acceptance of the human body and a primary law that its necessities be everywhere observed. Not such a great accomplishment, I thought, in seventy years. And yet it gave to mankind the leg-up they had to have for the happiness they long for.

CHICAGO[1]

A good deal of nonsense is talked about the personality of towns. What most people enjoy about a town is familiarity, not personality, and they can give no penetrating account of their affection. "What is the finest town in the world?" the New York reporters recently asked a young recruit, eager for him to eulogize New York. "Why," he answered, "San Malo, France. I was born there." That is the usual reason, perhaps the best reason, why a person likes any place on earth. The clew is autobiographical.

But towns do have personality. Contrast London and New York, or Portland and Norfolk, or Madison and St. Augustine. Chicago certainly has a personality, and it would be obscurantism of the most modern kind to pretend that there was no "soul" in Chicago either to like or to dislike. People who have never lived in Chicago are usually content with disliking it, and those who have seen it superficially, or smelled it in passing when the stockyard factories were making glue, can seldom understand why Chicagoans love it. Official visitors, of course, profess to admire it, with the eagerness of anxious missionaries seeking to make good with cannibals. But except for men who knew Bursley or Belfast, and slipped into Chicago as into old slippers--men like Arnold Bennett and George Bermingham--there are few outsiders who really feel at home. Stevenson passed through it on his immigrant journey across the plains, pondering that one who had so promptly subscribed a sixpence to restore the city after the fire should be compelled to pay for his own ham and eggs. He thought Chicago great but gloomy. Kipling shrank from it like a sensitive plant. It horrified him. H. G. Wells thought it amazing, but chiefly amazing as a lapse from civilization. All of these leave little doubt how Chicago first hits the eye. It is, in fact, dirty, unruly and mean. It has size without spaciousness, opportunity without imaginativeness, action without climax, wealth without distinction. A sympathetic artist finds picturesqueness in it, though far from gracious where most characteristic; but for the most part it is shoddy, dingy and vulgar, making more noise downtown than a boiler works, and raining smuts all day as a symbolic reproach from heaven. It is not for its beaux yeux that the outsider begins to love the town.

But a great town is like the elephant of the fable; one must see it altogether before one can define it; one can believe almost anything monstrous from a partial view. Time, in the case of Chicago, is supremely necessary--about three years as a minimum. Then its goodness passeth all pre-matrimonial understanding; its essence is disclosed.

Mr. H. C. Chatfield-Taylor has qualified, so far as time is concerned, to speak of Chicago, and I think it would be churlish not to agree that from the standpoint of the old settler he has done his city proud. All old Chicagoans will recognize at once why Mr. Taylor should go back to the beginning, and they will be delighted at the clarity with which the early history is expounded, as well as the era before the Civil War. They will also understand and rejoice over the repetition of grand old names--Gordon S. Hubbard, John Kinzie, Mark Beaubien, Uranus H. Crosby, Sherman of the Sherman hotel, General Hart L. Stewart and Long John Wentworth. In every town in the world there is, of course, a Long John or a Big Bill, but Chicagoans will savor this reference to their own familiar, and will delight in the snug feeling that they too "knew Chicago when." Mr. Taylor is also dear to his townsmen when he harks back to days before the Fire. In those days the West-siders were a little superior because they had the Episcopal Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, and the church-going folk could hear the "fast young men" speeding trotting horses past the church doors. Such performances seemed fairly worldly, but later did not Mr. Taylor himself drive his high-steppers to the races at Washington Park, and did he not woo the heart of the city where gilded youth cherished a "nod of recognition from Potter Palmer, John B. Drake, or John A. Rice." The dinners of antelope steak and roast buffalo at the Grand Pacific recall a Chicago antedating the World's Fair that left strong traces into the twentieth century, a Chicago that is commemorated with grace and kindliness in the fair pages of this book.

But this is not enough. If Mr. Taylor's heart lingers among the "marble-fronts" of his youth, this is not peculiarly Chicagoan. Such fond reminiscence is the common nature of man. And a better basis for loving Chicago must be offered than the evidence that one teethed on it, battered darling that it is. Mr. Taylor's better explanation, as I read it, is extremely significant. He identifies himself fully and eagerly with the New Englanders who made the town. Bounty-jumpers and squatters and speculators, war widows and politicians and anarchists and aliens--all these go into his perspective, as do the emergencies of the Fire and the splendors of the Fair. But the marrow of his pride in Chicago is his community with its origins in "men, like myself, of New England blood, whose fathers felled our forests and tilled our prairie land." Since the time he was born, he tells us, more than two million people have been added to the population of Chicago. Only a fifth of the Great West Side are now American-born, and the Lake Shore Drive was still a cemetery when Mr. Taylor was a boy on that dignified West Side. This links Mr. Taylor closely to the beginning of things. Hence he likes to insist in his kindly spirit that Chicago's puritan "aristocracy" is the source of Chicago altruism, that "the society of Chicago [is] more puritanical than that of any great city in the world," and that "back of Chicago's strenuousness and vim stands the spirit of her founders holding her in leash, the tenets of the Pilgrim Fathers being still a potent factor in her life.... She possesses a New England conscience to leaven her diverse character and make her truly--the pulse of America."

Every bird takes what he finds to build his own spiritual nest. Personally, I love Chicago, ugly and wild and rude, but I prefer to see it as an impuritan. Its sprawling hideousness, indeed, has always seemed a direct result of the private-minded policy that distinguished Chicago's big little men. The triumvirate that Mr. Taylor mentions had no statesmanship in them. One was an admirable huckster, another an inflexible paternalist, the third a fine old philistine who carved a destiny in ham. But these men gave themselves and their city to business enterprise in its ugliest manifestation. The city of course has its remissions, its loveliness, but the incidental brutality of that enterprise is a main characteristic of the city, a characteristic barely suggested by Mr. Taylor, not clearly imagined by Mr. Hornby in his graceful drawings, so beautifully reproduced.

One would like, as a corrective to Mr. Taylor's pleasant picture, some leaves from Upton Sinclair's Jungle, Jack London's Iron Heel, Frank Norris's Pit, H. K. Webster's Great Adventure, the fiction of Edith Wyatt and Henry Fuller and Robert Herrick and Will Paine and Weber Linn and Sherwood Anderson, the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg, the prose of Jane Addams. No one who looked at the City Council ten years ago, for example, can forget the brutality of that institution of collective life.

They called the old-time aldermen the "gray wolves." They looked like wolves, cold-eyed, grizzled, evil. They preyed on the city South side, West side, North side, making the shaky tenements and black brothels and sprawling immigrant-filled industries pay tribute in twenty ways. One night, curious to see Chicago at its worst, four of us went to a place that was glibly described as "the wickedest place in the world." It was a saloon under the West side elevated, and a room back of the saloon. At first it seemed merely dirty and meager, with its runty negro at the raucous piano. But at last the regular customers collected; the sots, the dead-beats, the human wreckage of both sexes, the woman of a fat pallor, the woman without a nose.... They surrounded us, piled against us, clawed us. And that, in its way, is Chicago, Stead's Satanic vision of it revealed.

But the other side of that hideousness in Chicago is the thing one loves it for, the large freedom from caste and cant which is so much an essential of democracy, the cordiality which comes with fraternity, the access to men and life of all kinds. Chicago is a scrimmage but also an adventure, a frank and passionate creator struggling with hucksters and hogsters, a blundering friend to genius among the assassins of genius, a frontier against the Europe that meant an established order, an order of succession and a weary bread-line. In Chicago, for all its philistinism, there is the condition of hope that is half the spiritual battle, whatever stockades the puritans try to build. It is that that makes one lament the silence in Mr. Taylor's pleasant book. But the puritanical tradition requires silence. Polite and refined, self-centered and private-minded, attached to property and content within limitations, it made visible Chicago what it is.

[1] _Chicago, by H. C. Chatfield-Taylor. Illustrations by Lester G.
Hornby. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co._

THE CLOUDS OF KERRY

It is the Gulf Stream, they say, that makes Kerry so wet. All the reservoir of the Atlantic, at any rate, lies to the west and south, and the prevailing winds come laden with its moisture. Kerry lifts its mountains to those impinging winds--mountains that in the sunlight are a living colorful presence on every side, but cruelly denuded by the constant rains. For usually the winds flow slowly from the sea, soft voluminous clouds gathered in their arms, and as they pass they sweep their drooping veils down over the silent and somewhat melancholy land.

In the night-time a light or two may be seen dotted at great intervals on those lonely hillsides, but for the most part the habitations are in the cooms or hollows grooved by nature between the parallel hills. The soil on the mountains is washed away. The vestiture that remains is a watery sedge, and it is only by garnering every handful of earth that the tenants can attain cultivation even in the cooms. Their fields, often held in common, are so small as to be laughable, and deep drainage trenches are dug every few yards. Sometimes in the shifting sunlight between showers a light-green patch will loom magically in the distance, witness to man's indefatigable effort to achieve a holding amid the rocks. An awkward boreen will climb to that holding, and if one goes there one may find a typical tall spare countryman, bright of eye and sharp of feature, housing in his impoverished cottage a large brood of children. To build with his own hands a watertight house is the ambition for which this man is slaving, and the slates and cement may be ready there near the pit which he himself has dug for foundation. A yellowish wife will perhaps be nursing the latest baby in the gloomy one-roomed hovel, and as one talks to the man, respectful but sensible, and admirable in more ways than he can ever dream of, one elf after another will come out, bare-legged, sharp-eyed, shy, inquisitive, to peer from far off at the stranger. He may be illiterate, this grave hillside man, but his starvelings go down the boreen to the bare cold schoolhouse, to be taught whatever the pompous well-meaning teacher can put into their minds of an education designed for civil service clerks. The children may be seen down there if one passes at their playtime, kicking a rag football with their bare feet, as poor and as gay as the birds.

There was a time when the iron was deep in these farmers' souls. Eking the marrow from the bones of the land, they were so poor that they had nothing to live on but potatoes and the milk of their own tiny cattle, the Kerry-Dexter breed of cattle that alone can pick a living from that ground. Until twenty-five years ago, I was told, some of the hillside men had never bought a pound of tea in their lives, or known what it was to spend money for clothes. To this day they wear their light-colored homespun, and one will meet at the fairs many fine sturdy middle-aged farmers with a cut to their homemade clothes that reminds one of the Bretons. It was from these simple and ascetic men, fighting nature for grim life, that landlords took their rackrents--one of them, the Earl of Kenmare, erecting a castle at near-by Killarney that thousands of Americans have admired. The fight against landlordism was bitter in Kerry. I met one countryman who was evicted three times, but finally, despite the remorseless protests of the agent, was allowed to harbor in a lean-to against the wall of the church. There were persecutions and murders, the mailed hand of the law and the stealthy hand of the assassin. Even to-day if that much-evicted tenant had not been sure of me he would not have spoken his mind. But when he was sure, he confided with a winning smile that at last he had something to live for and work for, a strip of land that was an "economic holding," determined by an Estates Commission which has shouldered the landlord to one side and estimated with its own disinterested eyes the large nutritive possibilities of gorse and heather and rock and bog.

Why do they stay? But most of them have not stayed. Kerry has not one-third the people to-day that it had seventy years ago. The storekeeper in a seaside village where I stopped in Kerry, a little father of the people if there ever was one, yet had acted the dubious role of emigration agent, and had passed thousands of his countrymen on to America. A few go to England. "For nine years," one hard-working occupier mentioned to me, "I lived in the shadow of London Bridge." But for Kerry, the next country to America, America is the land of golden promise. In a field called Coolnacapogue, "hollow of the dock leaves," I stopped to ask of a bright lad the way to Sneem, and he ended by asking me the way to America. It is west they turn, away from the Empire that "always foul-played us in the past, and I am afeard will foul-play us again."

"The next time you come, please God you'll bring us Home Rule." That is the way they speak to you, if they trust you. They want government where it cannot play so easily the tricks that seared them of old.

I went with a government inspector on one mission in Kerry. At the foot of the forbidding western hills there was a bleak tongue of land cut off by two mountain streams. At times these streams were low enough to ford with ease, but after a heavy rain the water would rise four or five feet in a few hours and the streams would become impassable torrents. For the sake of a widow whose hovel stood on this island the Commission consented to build a little bridge. The concrete piers had been set at either side successfully, but the central pier, five tons in weight, had only just been planted when a rain came, and a torrent, and the unwieldy block of cement had toppled over in the stream. This little catastrophe was the first news conveyed by the paternal storekeeper to the inspector on our arrival in town, and we walked out to see what could be done.

Standing by the stream, we were visible to the expectant woman on the hill. In the soft mournful light of the September afternoon I could see her outlined against the gray sky as she came flying to learn her fate. She came bare of head and bare of foot, a small plaid shawl clasped to her bosom with one hand. Her free hand supported her taut body as she leaned on her own pier and bent her deep eyes on us across the stream. As she told in the slow lilting accent of Kerry the pregnant story of the downfall of the center pier, she would cast those eyes to the inanimate bulk of concrete, half submerged in the water, as if to contemn it for lying there in flat helplessness. But she was not excited or obsequious. A woman of forty, her expression bespoke the sternness and gravity of her fight for existence, yet she was a quiet and valiant fighter. She was, I think, the most dignified suppliant I have ever beheld.

If the pier could not be raised, she foresaw the anxieties of the winter. She seemed to look into them through the grayness of the failing light. She foresaw the sudden risings of the stream, the race for her children to the schoolhouse, the risk of carrying them across on her back. And she clung to her children.

"You have had trouble, my poor woman?" the inspector said, knowing that her husband two years before had been drowned in the torrent.

"Aye, indeed, your honor, 'tis I am the pity of the world. One year ago my child was lost to me. It was in the night-time, he was taken with a hemorrhage, with respects to your honor. I woke the children to have them go for to bring the doctor, but it was too late an they returned. He quenched in my arms, at the dead hour of night."

"The pity of the world" she was in truth. The inspector could do nothing until the ground was firm enough to support horses and tackle in the spring. We walked back through the somber bog, the mountains seeming to creep after us, and we speculated on the bad work of the contractor. To the storekeeper we took our grievance, and there we came on another aspect of that plaintive acquiescence so strong in the woman. Yes, the storekeeper admitted with instant reasonableness, the inspector was right: Foley had failed about the bridge. "I'll haul him over," he said, full of sympathy for the woman. And he would haul him over. And the pier would lie there all winter.

If the people could feel that this solicitude of the Estates Commission were national, it would bind them to the government. But most of the inspectors are of the landlord world, ruling-class appointees, well-meaning, remote, superior, unable to read between the lines. And so Kerry remains with the old tradition of the government, suspicious of its intentions, crediting what genuine services there are to the race of native officials who alone have the intuition of Kerry's kind.

They want army recruits from Kerry, to defend the Empire; that Empire which meant landlords and land agents and rackrents for so many blind and crushing years. They want those straight and stalwart and manly fellows in the trenches. But Kerry knows what the trenches of Empire are already. It has fought starvation in them, dug deep in the bogs between sparse ridges of potatoes, for all the years it can remember. It is no wonder Kerry cannot grasp at once why it should go forth now to die so readily when it has only just grudgingly been granted a lease to live.

HENRY ADAMS[2]

Henry Adams was born with his name on the waiting list of Olympus, and he lived up to it. He lived up to it part of the time in London, as secretary to his father at the Embassy; part of the time at Harvard, teaching history; most of the time in Washington, in La Fayette Square. Shortly before he was born, the stepping stone to Olympus in the United States was Boston. Sometimes Boston and Olympus were confused. But not so long after 1838 the railroads came, and while Boston did its best to control the country through the railroads there was an inevitable shift in political gravity, and the center of power became Ohio. It was Henry Adams's fate to knock at the door of fame when Ohio was in power; and Ohio did not comprehend Adams's credentials. Those credentials, accordingly, were the subject of some wry scrutiny by their possessor. They were valid, at any rate, at the door of history, and Henry Adams gave a dozen years to Jefferson and Madison. It was his humor afterwards to say he had but three serious readers--Abram Hewitt, Wayne MacVeagh and John Hay. His composure in the face of this coolness was, however, a strange blending of serenities derived equally from the cosmos and from La Fayette Square. He was not above the anodyne of exclusiveness. Even his autobiography, a true title to Olympus, was issued to a bare hundred readers before his death, and was then deemed too incomplete to be made public. It is made public now nominally for "students" but really for the world that didn't know an Adams when it saw one.

For mere stuff the book is incomparable. Henry Adams had the advantage of full years and happy faculty, and his book is the rich harvest of both. He had none of that anecdotal inconsequentiality which is a bad tradition in English recollections. He saved himself from mere recollections by taking the world as an educator and himself as an experiment in education. His two big books were contrasted as _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: A Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity_, and _The Education of Henry Adams: A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity_. The stress on multiplicity was all the more important because he considered himself eighteenth century to start with, and had, in fact, the unity of simple Americanism at the beginning.